Roc Morin | The Atlantichttps://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/2018-07-05T11:28:41-04:00Copyright 2019 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-545060<p>Money may not be able to buy love, but here in Japan, it can certainly buy the appearance of love—and appearance, as the dapper Ishii Yuichi insists, is everything. As a man whose business involves becoming other people, Yuichi would know. The handsome and charming 36-year-old is on call to be your best friend, your husband, your father, or even a mourner at your funeral.</p><p>His 8-year-old company, <a href="http://family-romance.com">Family Romance</a>, provides professional actors to fill any role in the personal lives of clients. With a burgeoning staff of 800 or so actors, ranging from infants to the elderly, the organization prides itself on being able to provide a surrogate for almost any conceivable situation.</p><p>Yuichi believes that Family Romance helps people cope with unbearable absences or perceived deficiencies in their lives. In an increasingly isolated and entitled society, the CEO predicts the exponential growth of his business and others like it, as à la carte human interaction becomes the new norm.</p><p>I sat down recently with Yuichi in a café on the outskirts of Tokyo, to discuss his business and what it means to be, in the words of his company motto, “more than real.”</p><hr><p><strong>Roc Morin: </strong>Just to be perfectly clear, you’ve come as yourself today, haven’t you?</p><p><strong>Ishii Yuichi:</strong> Yes, at this moment I am only myself.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What was your very first role?<strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> I had a single-mother friend, and she had a son. He was trying to enter a private school, but they denied him solely because he had no father. I wanted to challenge the unfairness of Japanese society, so I posed as his father.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Were you successful?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Not in that situation. But, it inspired the idea for this business.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>When was your first success?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> I played a father for a 12-year-old with a single mother. The girl was bullied because she didn’t have a dad, so the mother rented me. I’ve acted as the girl’s father ever since. I am the only real father that she knows.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>And this is ongoing?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Yes, I’ve been seeing her for eight years. She just graduated high school.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Does she understand that you’re not her real father?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> No, the mother hasn’t told her.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How do you think she would feel if she discovered the truth?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> I think she would be shocked. If the client never reveals the truth, I must continue the role indefinitely. If the daughter gets married, I have to act as a father in that wedding, and then I have to be the grandfather. So, I always ask every client, “Are you prepared to sustain this lie?” It’s the most significant problem our company has.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>So, you could be involved with her for the rest of your life?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> It’s risky that she might discover the truth someday. In this company, one person can only have five families at a time. That’s the rule. It’s not only about secrecy. The client always asks for the ideal husband, the ideal father. That’s a very difficult role to maintain.</p><figure><img alt="" height="467" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/11/Ishii_Yuichi_Credit_Roc_Morin/19c4b2044.jpg" width="700"><figcaption class="caption">Ishii Yuichi (Roc Morin)</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How do you determine what the ideal husband or father is?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> There’s an order form where every possible preference is listed: hairstyle, glasses, beard, fashion sense ... Do you like classy or casual? Is he affectionate or stern? When he arrives, should he be talkative or tired from a long day at work?</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What did the mother you mentioned earlier request on her form?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> She wanted the father to be kind, very kind. He would never yell. She wanted the kind of father that would be able to deliver wise advice.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How did you create that persona?<strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> I’m not married in real life. I have no kids. At first, I couldn’t really find in myself the kind of father that she wanted me to be. So, I watched a lot of movies about fathers, and I cultivated my persona through the movies.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Can you describe the sessions with your fake daughter?<strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Sometimes we dine together. We’ve been to theme parks, like Disneyland. We go shopping in Harajuku once a month. The mother pays about 20,000 yen per four hours, plus expenses. That’s about $200.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What’s your cover story?<strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> I told her I have my own family now, and that’s why I can’t see her often.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What happened to the real father?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Even the mother doesn’t know. There was a lot of physical violence. They divorced, and that was the end of it.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Did you take his name?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Yes, I use the father’s name—first and last.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How do you handle it when the daughter gets angry or sad?<strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> I never yell, no matter what. That was in the order-form description. The girl was bullied also, if you remember, so her feelings can be very unsettling. There was also a rebellious time, in her teens. She was having difficulties with her mother. When she’s with me, though, she always asks, “Why do you have to leave now?” It’s unpleasant, but it is a reasonable emotion.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Does she love you?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> She does. It’s easy to feel her love. She talks about her relationship with her mother, she shares sensitive feelings, she opens up to me.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Does any aspect of your real self seep in?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> I don’t allow it to, otherwise I would become self-conscious.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Do you feel like you have a responsibility to the daughter, because of your connection to her now?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Depending on the situation, it’s different. The heaviness is different, but everywhere I go, I feel it—the responsibility.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>When you’re working, is it purely acting, or do the feelings ever become real?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> It’s a business. I’m not going to be her father for 24 hours. It’s a set time. When I am acting with her, I don't really feel that I love her, but when the session is over and I have to go, I do feel a little sad. The kids cry sometimes. They say, “Why do you have to leave?” In those instances, I feel very sorry that I’m faking it—very guilty. There are times, when I’m done with the work and I come back home, where I sit and watch TV. I find myself wondering, “Is this, now, the real me, or the actor?”</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How do you answer that question?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> I don’t think I have an answer. The person that used to be me—is he me now? I know that it’s common for actors to feel that way. If you’re a really good actor—if you’re in it all the time—it feels very unsettling.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>When do you feel the most like yourself?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> When I’m with my family, my real family. It’s agonizing to be alone and just think, “Is this really me, right now?” The inner monologues are tough.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How do you know that your family hasn’t been hired?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> That’s a good question! No one knows.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>I have a project collecting <a href="http://www.facebook.com/worlddreamatlas">dreams</a>, and often work is a common theme. Do you dream about your work?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> I dream about my client—when she cries because I have to leave. It’s a very emotional situation.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How is the dream different from reality?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Sometimes, in the dream, I tell her the truth.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What do you say?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> I say, “I’m very sorry. I’m a member of the Family Romance corporation. I’m not your true father.” Right before she can respond—just as she opens her mouth to speak, I wake up. I am terrified of the answer, so I just wake up.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Are you ever someone else in your dreams?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> In Japanese business culture, there is a situation where you have to visit a company and say I’m deeply sorry for what I did and just bow and bow. Occasionally, I dream about that.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How does that work when you’re hired to do that in real life?<strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Usually, I accompany a salaryman who made a mistake. I take the identity of the salaryman myself, then I apologize profusely for his mistake. Have you seen the way we say sorry? You go have to down on your hands and knees on the floor. Your hands have to tremble. So, my client is there standing off to the side—the one who actually made the mistake—and I’m prostrate on the floor writhing around, and the boss is there red-faced as he hurls down abuse from above. Sometimes, I wonder to myself, “Am I actually doing this?”</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What do you feel?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> I feel extremely uncomfortable. I’m just thinking, “I’m innocent!” I want to point at the actual culprit and shout, “He did it!”</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Are you ever hired to apologize in other situations?<strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Yes, sometimes in relationships. Imagine there’s a married couple, and the wife cheats on the husband. When that happens, the husband often demands a confrontation with the other man. Naturally, this can be difficult to arrange, because the man usually runs away. In that case, they bring me instead.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What happens then?<strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> There’s a manual for everything in this company. We use psychology to determine the optimal outcome. In this case, the standard tactic is to make me look like a <em>yakuza</em> [gangster]. Typically, I arrive with the wife, and the husband is there, and suddenly I will just bow then deeply apologize. Usually, the husband will berate me, but because I appear to be a yakuza, he won’t pursue the matter further.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>I understand you work as a boyfriend too. Can you describe that experience?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Those clients are usually older ladies. It used to be primarily women in their 50s, but now there are even more women in their 30s.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Is this sexual or just platonic?<strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> It’s a dating situation. It’s not about having sexual relations, although some women have expected that. Generally, the women just want to have fun with a younger man. They want to feel young again.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Why do you think these women hire you?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> The women typically say that in a real relationship, you’re slowly building trust. It takes years to create a strong connection. For them, it’s a lot of hassle and disappointment. Imagine investing five years with someone and then they break up with you. It’s just easier to schedule two hours per week to interact with an ideal boyfriend. There’s no conflict, no jealousy, no bad habits. Everything is perfect.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>You’ve been on so many fake dates—what is it like for you, in your own personal life, to go on an actual date?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> I don’t have a real girlfriend right now. Real dating feels like work. It feels like work to care for a real person.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Do you plan on having a family someday?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Honestly, I’m full. I’m full of family, and I feel like it’s a lot to manage. Sometimes, a client asks me to be there in the room when she gives birth. One time, the client was a pregnant woman, and rather than ask her parents, she wanted me to be there. So, I went. Some women propose to me, and I say no, but it’s very hard for me to say no.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Why?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Many women say, “I want to marry you.” I say, “You’re in love with an order form. It’s not me—it’s the acting that you love.” If I married her, I’d have to keep acting. And, there are certain women who are wonderful, but the soul I have with them is not my real soul. So, I cannot and I would not.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Do you ever prefer playing a role to being yourself?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> I like playing the caring father. I play with the kids, even when I’m tired. It’s very tough when you're exhausted, but you still show up, and you try to create happiness. That’s the kind of father I admire, even when it’s me.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What is your favorite role?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> It doesn’t happen often, but there are cases when I have to be a groom. There are situations where parents pressure a daughter to marry—if she’s a lesbian, for example. So, they have an entire wedding, and it’s a fake wedding, except for the client’s family. The friends, and everyone else are fake. My side is all fake. Fifty fake people all pretending it’s real. The cost is 2 million yen, for everyone.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How many times have you been married?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Three times.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>And the brides—they never see you again?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> We never meet again.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Do the brides get emotional—having to marry a stranger?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> The women usually don’t like showing emotion to me, but sometimes I feel emotional. Everyone on my side is a coworker, and they’re all celebrating me. So, there is a moment when it does seem very real.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Why do you think this kind of business thrives in Japan specifically?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> The Japanese are not expressive people. There is a communication deficit. In conversation, we do not express ourselves, our opinions, our emotions. Others come first, before our own desires. The family size is diminishing too. Families used to be larger. Now, you eat alone.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What do you predict for the future of your business?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> The demand is increasing. More people, for example, want help to appear popular on social media. We had one man recently who paid a huge sum just to fly with five employees to Las Vegas and take pictures for Facebook.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Have you or any of your employees hired other actors for your own lives?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> It happens. For instance, some employees hire actors to praise them in the presence of people they want to impress. Personally, when I throw speaking seminars, I often bring extras to bolster the crowd.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Is everyone in the world replaceable?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> That’s a very good question. I’m not sure. There was one case of a man in his 60s. His wife died, and he wanted to order another copy of her. We provided that.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>And he called the new woman by his wife’s old name?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Yes, the same name, and he wanted her to call him what his wife had. She called him <em>Otōsan—</em>it means father. In Japan, it’s pretty common to say <em>father</em>, even if you’re the wife.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Did she have the same memories as the wife?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> There are certain memories, yes. There’s a blank sheet, and the client writes the memories that he wants the wife to remember.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>When your employees mimic a strong emotional connection like that—is it ever a problem that they become too emotionally attached to their clients?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Attachment is a problem. So, there are rules. They cannot share personal contact information. If it’s a boyfriend or girlfriend scenario, they cannot be alone in a room. They can hold hands, but they cannot hug. No kissing. No sex.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What makes your company different from competitors?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> We have a huge variation of employees and the dedication to create an experience that surpasses reality. That’s why our motto is “more than real.” We had a case recently where a dying man wanted to see his grandchild, but it would not have been born in time. His daughter was able to rent an infant for the day.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What does it mean to be “more than real”?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> There are less concerns. There is less misunderstanding and conflict. Our clients can expect better results.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>You’re offering a more perfect form of reality?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> More ideal. More clean.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Are there any requests that you’ve rejected?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> Unless it’s a crime, we will accept any request. Some people with anorexia, for example, want to see people who are willing to eat in front of them. They just find relief in watching a person who eats a lot. We will even do that.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What does the word “real” mean to you?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> I believe the term “real” is misguided. Take Facebook, for example. Is that real? Even if the people in the pictures haven’t been paid, everything is curated to such an extent that it hardly matters.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Do you believe that the concept of “realness” has become invalid?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> I believe that the world is always unfair, and my business exists because of that unfairness.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>So, you are correcting injustice?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> A woman with a boyfriend doesn’t need to hire a boyfriend. A man with a father doesn’t need to hire a father. It's about bringing balance to society.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Is it possible to avoid the truth forever?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> The truth does have to come out eventually. The happiness is not endless, but that doesn’t mean that it’s without value. The child had a father when she needed him most. It might have been a brief period, and she might know the truth now, but she had a meaningful experience at that time.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>In your own personal life, what do you want that you don't have?</p><p><strong>Yuichi:</strong> There is nothing more that I want. I've met so many clients. I've played so many roles with them. By doing my job, their dreams come true. In that way, my dreams come true as well. I feel fulfilled, just being needed.</p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedMiho Aikawa / Getty / Katie Martin / The AtlanticHow to Hire Fake Friends and Family2017-11-07T08:00:00-05:002018-03-20T10:41:11-04:00In Japan, you can pay an actor to impersonate your relative, spouse, coworker, or any kind of acquaintance.tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-537504<p>Kamisha Hendrix’s heart lay on the table between us. Seventy days ago, this heart had been beating inside of her, back behind the dark scar that plunged into the neckline of her blouse.</p><p>“No—my heart didn’t beat,” Hendrix clarified. “It trembled.”</p><p>The chemo used to treat her non-Hodgkin's lymphoma had damaged her cardiac muscle irreparably, reducing its strength to 15 percent. She regularly lapsed in and out of consciousness. “I felt like I was moving through mud,” she recalled.</p><p>Hendrix looked at the heart on the table, the organ she had carried for 44 years, and spoke in its imaginary voice. “You wanna live?” She gave the heart a whimpering intonation. “Okay, I'll give you another beat.”</p><p>She switched back to her own voice, “Thank you, heart. Thanks a lot, friend.”</p><p>Three months ago, Hendrix’s mother, Carolyn Woods, had already written her obituary and tucked it away in a drawer. The theme, Woods explained, was <em>For Whom the Bell Tolls</em>. “It was about everyone coming to pay their last respects—and the people are the bell. All that crying and wailing would be the people tolling for her.”</p><p>Ultimately, the story of Hendrix’s heart did end in a funeral. Somewhere, on a clear May morning, an organ donor died. Within hours, Hendrix received a new heart.</p><p>The transplant saved Hendrix’s life, and yet—it would also be technically true to say that in the process, a part of her had died. We were in Dallas, Texas, at the Baylor Heart and Vascular Center to reunite Hendrix with her native heart and reflect on what it means to live without it.</p><p>The idea for this kind of encounter originated with William Roberts, Baylor’s chief cardiac pathologist. In 2014, Roberts began the Heart-to-Heart program, inviting cardiac transplant patients to see and hold their former organs. The primary objective was education. Roberts delivers a health lecture with the patient’s own heart as Exhibit A.</p><p>For transplantees, compliance with doctors’ lifestyle instructions is critical to recovery and longevity. One recent <a href="http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/8794030">study</a> found that in the domains of diet, exercise, medication, and tobacco avoidance, noncompliance ranged from 18 to 37 percent. Furthermore, compliance was observed to decrease over time.</p><p>While Hendrix’s heart failure was primarily due to another cause, her condition was exacerbated by unhealthy lifestyle choices—a factor that impacts nearly all heart-transplant patients. With Heart-to-Heart, Roberts has found a way to clearly demonstrate the effect of these choices on the heart itself. According to a <a href="http://www.jhltonline.org/article/S1053-2498(16)30186-3/abstract">study</a> co-authored by the cardiologist, 75 percent of program participants reported that the experience has changed their health-related behaviors “to a great degree.”</p><figure><img alt="Slivers of a human heart" height="420" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/08/James_Murthas_heart_Roc_Morin/c1404fa47.jpg" width="630"><figcaption class="caption">James Murtha's heart (Roc Morin)</figcaption></figure><p>Roberts begins each session with raw statistics.</p><p>“In the United States, there are 6 million people living with heart failure,” he lectures in a honeyed Georgian accent. “Every year, only about 2,200 of those people receive heart transplants. So, you are very, very special. You’ve been given a second chance.”</p><p>Unceremoniously lifting the surgical cloth that covers the heart, Roberts describes what he sees. The history of the heart is there, incontrovertibly embedded in the organ. Most are cocooned in hard yellow fat.</p><p>“If you dropped this in the Mississippi,” Roberts opines, “it would float all the way to the Gulf.”</p><p>“Oh my god!” Hendrix gasped. “Look at all that fat! I guess those chips have gotta go.”</p><p>“That’s right,” Roberts replied. “And those cows, chickens, and pigs on your plate.”</p><p>In addition to education, the reunion also provides an opportunity for closure—a benefit that Roberts didn’t initially expect. After facing death—what transplantee John Bell prefers to call “the abyss”—survivors are frequently left traumatized. That reality is apparent in the standard warlike medical rhetoric, with doctors and patients alike speaking the language of soldiers. Together they fight their battles, target the enemy, eradicate and annihilate. With the focus on winning, dedicated opportunities to stop and reflect are rare.</p><p>Tina Sample’s ordeal began with a massive heart attack that was misdiagnosed as a gastrointestinal issue. After days of breathless agony, she was finally correctly diagnosed at a different hospital. “I had what they call ‘the widowmaker,’” she recounted, “100 percent blockage. I had a massive amount of blood clots throughout my heart. The doctor had never seen anything like it in his 24 years of practicing medicine. He called me a miracle.”</p><p>In the months that followed, Sample lived in constant fear of death. “I was just so scared every night,” she confessed. “I had this terror that this could be my last night on earth, so I’d try to keep myself awake. I would keep myself awake until 4 or 5 a.m. I wanted to see my son graduate college. I wanted to know my grandkids. There were so many things I wanted to see.”</p><p>James Murtha had been healthy his entire life. “I’ve never broke a bone in my body,” he insisted. “I’ve never really been sick at all, except for the flu once and chicken pox when I was a kid. So this—when it hit, it hit hard.”</p><p>Murtha had been driving home from work when he began to shiver and sweat. It was a heart attack. Later, he recalled being in a hospital bed, on life support, his liver and kidneys failing. He says he had a vision of his mother, lying in a similar bed half a century earlier. It was one of his earliest memories.</p><p>“I basically went back in time,” he began. “I was five. They brought us all in, the night she passed away. I remember her telling me, ‘You’re gonna be good for your dad now, aren't you?’ There were five of us kids, and she made my dad promise that he'd keep us all together.” She died in that bed, at the age of 25, from a rare cancer.</p><p>As Murtha lay suspended between life and death, the visions continued. His wife grasped his hand as he described what he called an out-of-body experience: “I was in this place looking for my older brother Mike. We had been talking about getting together. He was a dreamer. Oh, it had been over 30, 40 years since we’d played together. And then he died. But, I was in this place, like a green forest, meadows, and there were these bright figures all around. And, there was this one figure, I couldn’t—it was just really bright, and he was in a robe like Jesus. And, he told me, ‘Your brother is home, you need to go find yourself.’”</p><p>Murtha awoke in an intensive care unit, with a new heart bounding in his chest. His old heart went first to the pathology lab for an autopsy. At that point, Roberts claims, “99.5 percent of hospitals throw the hearts away. They just don’t have the space to keep them.” Baylor is different, however. Their lab contains thousands of hearts in permanent storage, making it one of the most extensive cardiac research facilities in the world. The availability of these organs creates a unique opportunity for a program like Heart-to-Heart. Each transplant patient at Baylor is routinely informed about the option, which is promoted as an educational opportunity.</p><p>On the day of a viewing session, clinical coordinator Saba Ilyas carefully retrieves and prepares each organ. The patients come in, sometimes alone, sometimes with their families, all eyeing the tray with the bulging surgical towel.</p><p>Hendrix had expected to see something “black and shriveled, probably three times the normal size, and just jello-like.”</p><p>Bell had expected a big red ideograph, “like when you open a Valentine’s card.”</p><p>“It wasn’t like that at all though,” he continued. “What it reminded me of, was a piece of roast beef.”</p><p>Under the glaring examination lights of the Baylor pathology lab, the visceral reality of what had actually happened to these people was an abstraction. I was there, holding a lump of raw meat in my hands, trying to feel the life that had once pulsated through it. Across culture and time, the heart has been a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/08/the-enduring-metaphors-of-the-heart-this-mortal-coil-fay-bound-alberti/494375/?utm_source=feed">metaphor</a> for love, for valor, for the soul itself—for everything we can sense but never touch. Here too, at the viewing, it was evident, by the gentle reverence it inspired, by the tender way in which it was held—the meaning of this organ transcended its mere function and form. Each transplantee was left to interpret the significance of this experience for themselves.</p><figure><img alt="A nan wearing a white shirt and blue latex gloves holds his own heart in front of his chest." height="467" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/08/James_Murtha_holding_his_heart_Roc_Morin/650914807.jpg" width="700"><figcaption class="caption">James Murtha holds his own heart. (Roc Morin)</figcaption></figure><p>“The whole time you’re holding your heart,” Bell described, “your brain wants to have a little conversation with you—like you shouldn’t really be doing this. This is not normal. And, you’re like—well, but here it is. I have my heart right here in my hands, and it’s normal to me.” Bell later recalled opening his eyes for the first time after his operation. “In a very poignant moment, I told my new heart that I’d take care of it as best I could for as long as I could.”</p><p>Hendrix speculated about the identity of her donor. Based on the frenetic surge of energy she reports experiencing since the transplant, she mused that “it feels like a tennis player.” Afterwards, she spoke again about the borrowed life source she carries inside of her. “It’s like the donor, in some way, is still alive. I think, if the donor was a happy person, they’re still a happy person, it just manifests itself through me.”</p><p>For Sample, the heart in her chest feels palpably foreign. She has dreamed about her unknown donor—envisioning him kneeling before her, offering up his heart with his own two hands. She has stopped using the common phrase “my heart” to describe her feelings. She has replaced it, sometimes haltingly, with “my mind.”</p><p>Bell held his former heart in front of his chest, with hands that shook from the drugs he must take for the rest of his life to keep his body from rejecting his new organ. The survivor found himself unexpectedly smiling. “To see my native heart, this thing that had caused so much pain and heartache, and to be able to walk away [from it]—I felt victorious.”</p><p>Hendrix thought of God, and of all her mother’s fervent prayers. “It made me feel how truly blessed I am to be here.”</p><p>Sample’s emotions overwhelmed her. “When something is gone that’s been a part of you—the thing that gives you life—there’s a sense of loss. There’s a grieving process that you have to go through. It’s crazy, but it’s like a person. It’s dead. My heart is dead, and there it is, lying on the table right there. If your mind goes to that place, then you can’t help but feel that loss. I told my heart ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t take care of you better.’ It brought tears to my eyes, truly. I needed to say goodbye.”</p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedRoc MorinKamisha Hendrix holds her own heart.Transplantees Find Catharsis in Holding Their Old Hearts2017-08-22T08:00:00-04:002017-08-22T15:56:12-04:00An initiative reunites transplant recipients with their former organs for education and therapy.tag:theatlantic.com,2017:50-520164<p>During an art-therapy session, Naticia Leon once stitched together fabric dolls without faces. “That’s what it feels like to be trafficked,” she says. “You’re not your own person. You don’t have an identity.”</p><p>For eight years, Leon worked across the West Coast of the United States under a series of sex traffickers. Each had named and renamed her many times. “They would tell me that this is what they’re gonna call me,” she explains. “Sometimes it would be Hispanic like Marta or Jessica. That was the case with most Mexican women—especially Marta. There were a lot of those.”</p><p>When assuming each persona, “at first, I would shut my emotions off temporarily,” she says. “Then, over time, it became just who I was. I started being monotoned every day—like a robot being programmed. That’s how I react to things all the time now. I’m not happy. I’m not angry. I’m not sad.”</p><p>I met the 28-year-old for the first time earlier this year in the waiting room of Jerome Potozkin’s office in Danville, California. The plastic surgeon offers free tattoo removals for sex-trafficking survivors.<a id="TopAnhor" name="TopAnhor"> </a>Syneron Candela, the makers of the PicoWay tattoo-removal laser he uses, arranges their transportation.<a href="#BottomAnchor"><strong>*</strong></a> Leon was undergoing a second round of treatment to obliterate a mark made on her by one of her pimps. The tattoo reads “Smitty,” the street name of a former trafficker, and a sign to other pimps that she was his property. Nearly all of the women Leon worked with had them. Like her, many survivors are seeking out an array of charitable tattoo <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/nov/16/sp-the-tattooed-trafficking-survivors-reclaiming-their-past">cover-up</a> and <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/talking-about-trauma/201607/branding-tattoos-use-ink-violate-women">removal</a> services.</p><figure><img alt="" height="420" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/03/Natasha/26a0339e4.jpg" width="630"><figcaption class="caption">Naticia Leon, a former sex-trafficking victim<br>
(<em>Roc Morin</em>)</figcaption></figure><p>It has been a year and a half since Leon escaped. During this time, she has lived in a communal home for former sex-trafficking victims with her young son, run by <a href="http://loveneverfailsus.com">Love Never Fails</a>, an NGO operating in the San Francisco Bay area. When we met in Potozkin’s office, she greeted me with a hug—something she never would have been capable of until recently. A year and a half ago, even a handshake would have been too much physical contact, she says. Her new capacity for touch was a sign of her rehabilitation.</p><p>Still, remnants of past traumas continue to complicate her recovery. She has a recurring nightmare in which an endless series of men appear at her door, echoing a scene that would have been repeated up to 20 times a day while she was working. It was, she recalls, “that terrifying moment when you open the door and you don't know if the person that's coming into your room is going to be safe or if they’re going to hurt you.” In those dreams, the men are always faceless, too.</p><p>The violence from her exploiters and her clients was random, yet constant. The women from Love Never Fails describe constant beatings, having guns pressed against their heads, and rags soaked with noxious chemicals forced over their faces. Although difficult to quantify, one <a href="http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2009.173229">study</a> found that 95 percent of sex-trafficking victims had been physically abused while working.</p><p>“Every day my traffickers were scared of something,” Leon says. “Would they get robbed? Would the police come in? Would they get enough money? They beat me because they had no one else to beat. They’d beat you if you looked at somebody the wrong way, or wore the wrong makeup, or if they think you had an attitude, or they think you're lying. Whatever it was, they would find a reason if they felt like it.”</p><p>Over coffee, Leon demonstrated how to breathe after being hit. “If you get kicked in the stomach or choked bad, you can’t breathe through your mouth—there’s too much of an open gap. You have to breathe through your nose. It’s a different way of breathing.”</p><p>Leon continues to address past ordeals like these in intensive therapy sessions at her communal home. The emotional impact of her trauma is slowly fading, and as she undergoes successive laser treatments, so too is the tattoo on her arm that has served as a constant reminder of her former life. “Every time I wash myself, I see it,” she says, “But after I got the first treatment it’s started to disappear. I’m looking forward to when I don’t have to keep seeing it and being reminded every day.”</p><p>As Potozkin’s team prepared her for the laser, Leon spoke about the other tattoos on her body—the ones she had chosen for herself. There is a dragon, for protection; the name of her two sons; the name of a former lover; and the name of her biological mother, from whom she was separated at the age of 3.</p><p>“She was a prostitute, too,” Leon says. “My dad was a drug dealer, so that’s how I was born. She died when I was 12, I think. I forget how old I was. Somebody killed her over drugs. I guess she owed a lot of money. So, yeah, they found her on Mother’s Day, face down, in the gutter.”</p><p>The crackling sounds of the laser began as she continued. “I don’t really remember her. The strongest memory I have is of her talking on the phone, sitting on a brick wall, and I was leaning against her stomach on my back. She was stroking my hair the way I stroke the hair of my own son now. I was put into foster care soon after that, when I was 3 years old. They put us in foster care because our house was burning down. The police came, and there were no adults there, so they put us in the system.”</p><p>Leon spoke about her journey through the foster-care network. She lived in seven different homes, one of which she was removed from after she was raped by one of the family members, she says. She got wrapped up in trafficking soon after she aged out of the system. At the time, she was fighting for custody of her first son and needed the money to pay a lawyer.</p><p>As the laser session concluded, we discussed the effect that the body has on the mind—how altering one can alter the other. I asked Leon if her relationship to her body had changed. While working as a prostitute, it had been both the only valued part of her and the source of her suffering.</p><p>“I don’t see my body as a tool anymore,” she said after a moment of reflection. “I'm a mom now. I’ve escaped. So, that makes me a survivor. Now, people see me as a person and I'm appreciative of that.”</p><p>She describes herself as a window that once was bare and barred. The bars are gone now, she says. Her window trim has been painted. She has colorful curtains. “If somebody does open me up,” she says, “it’s to know more about me, and not to just walk through me. And I don’t feel like somebody wants to throw a rock at me. They want to clean me with Windex and see me shine.”</p><hr><p><small><a href="#TopAnhor"><b>*</b></a><a id="BottomAnchor" name="BottomAnchor"> </a><em>This article originally misidentified the maker of the tattoo-removal laser. We regret the error. </em></small><small><em> </em></small></p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedRoc Morin Naticia Leon, a victim of sex trafficking, has “Smitty” tattooed on her arm—the street name of a former trafficker and a sign that she was his property.Erasing the ‘Ownership’ Tattoos on Sex-Trafficking Victims2017-03-21T11:00:00-04:002017-03-29T17:01:32-04:00A woman who escaped the industry reflects on how changes to the body can help with recovery.tag:theatlantic.com,2016:50-501614<p>“I didn't know why I was collecting pictures of volcanoes,” Amelia Walker confided. The true meaning of her fixation would only emerge years later.</p><p>Like other snapshot collectors, the psychology student devotedly scours flea markets, estate sales, and the internet in search of her quarry. She sifts through the discarded memories of other people’s lives in order to find images that are personally significant.</p><p>“At the time, I thought it was purely aesthetic. Volcanoes are beautiful,” she continued. “It was just recently that I realized how precisely that theme corresponded to a major crisis in my life: destruction, danger, inevitability, tension built up over many years. I started collecting volcanoes just before the first signs of it appeared. It was like a dream; I was seeking out an image to reflect back a feeling I could not articulate.”</p><p>Before the volcano period, she had collected images of people with their faces turned away. After the volcanoes, it was people in water.</p><p>She remembered standing in the ocean herself back then, experiencing the sensation of the waves, created by the gravitational pull of a distant moon. “The photographs gave me that same feeling–a certain kind of loneliness, but also connection to a force greater than myself, to the kind of chaos that ultimately creates exquisite patterns.”</p><p>“I can't believe photography exists,” she exclaimed. “It seems so incredible to me that a moment can be captured—that I can show up 50 years later and pick up an image and have this emotional response. It feels like someone is whispering to me across the decades. Sometimes, it almost feels like I can whisper back.”</p><p align="center">* * *</p><p>The origins of snapshot collecting are unclear, however, as a collector myself, judging by price increases of old photographs at flea markets and online, the phenomenon is growing rapidly. Once the domain of hobbyists, the practice has recently begun to enter the art world, with some starting to consider snapshots to be found objects in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp. That was the perspective taken by the National Gallery in Washington in 2007 when it exhibited the collection of <a href="http://hafny.org/blog/?tag=Robert+E.+Jackson">Robert E. Jackson</a>. More recently, in 2014, the Swann Gallery of New York conducted the first sale of found photographs by a major art dealer.</p><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="519" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/09/A_snapshot_from_the_authors_collection/1b817b09c.jpg" width="337"><figcaption class="caption">A photograph from the author’s collection<br>
(Courtesy of Roc Morin)</figcaption></figure><p>One of the attendees of that auction was <a href="http://www.danlenchnerphotography.com/">Dan Lenchner</a>. I met the collector and catering-company owner sometime later in his sprawling Manhattan apartment. We sat at his dining room table studying a standard studio portrait—a group of 12 taken in Łódź, Poland circa 1935. Only, we knew—as the sitters never could have—that in 10 years, everyone in the photo would be dead. Everyone except the man in the back row, second from the right. In the picture, he already seems separate from them—he is the only one not looking into the lens. It is a portrait of a Jewish family. It is also, inversely, a portrait of the Holocaust—a documentation of what was lost.</p><p>The man in the back row is Dan Lenchner’s father. “One of the ironies,” the son noted, “is that my father didn’t get along with his family. Even before the war, he was not a happy man. He never found himself.”</p><p>The ancestral portrait was passed down as an heirloom, but to Lenchner, it is also a collectable—one of 15,000 other images that he has bought over the years. The 70-year-old has published several books of found photographs, displaying them in pairs intended to evoke specific connections between disparate subjects: a prisoner and a baby, kids with toy guns and a wounded soldier, a woman in a hijab, and a woman in a catcher’s mask.</p><p>Among these, as among all snapshots, there is a broader connection too. Walker describes it as a shared relationship to time. “Every person in a photo is older than when that photo was taken,” she elaborated. “I look at a photo and I know someone is probably dead and that one day I'll be dead too. There must be some secret of time held in these images. I can’t help thinking that if I just study them hard enough, I'll finally be able to understand it.”</p><p>Several years ago at the New York Hell’s Kitchen flea market, Noel Buscemi, a snapshot vendor who has since passed away himself, made a similar remark to me. “Pretty much everyone in these pictures is dead,” he commented, “along with everyone who ever cared about them.” He waved a hand over his wares, strewn haphazardly in boxes like mounds of autumn leaves. The snapshots had been torn out of context. Whatever they had once meant to their former owners had vanished.</p><p>“The photographs have lost their original meanings,” veteran collector <a href="http://lookingforsnapshots.tumblr.com/">Joel Rotenberg</a> said. “Now they have room for the meanings we give them.”</p><p>Still, remnants of original meaning persevere, in a scribbled note on the back of the picture, perhaps—a name, a date, a place, or even a personal reflection. Maher Ahmad, an art director, owns four out of a set of 20 meticulously compiled family scrapbooks entitled <em>The Life History and Various Doings of Francis Saunders Spon</em>.</p><p>“They were created by his mother,” the 66-year-old explained. “She was a woman obsessed with recording her son’s life—a day-by-day account of what he did.”</p><p>We sat in Ahmad’s library in the Hollywood Hills as he carefully turned the pages.</p><p>“July 20th 1906, Francis celebrated his third birthday by having a little party. The following children being present: Harold Smith, Ramona Duryee, Margaret Duryee...”</p><p>“Christmas 1907. This is a list of all the gifts he got from Santa Claus: 1. Piano, 2. Drums, 3. Table…”</p><p>“Here is his Junior-Senior prom January 9th, 1920. Francis took Pauline Pharo to this dance, and then there’s the newspaper article about it, and here’s his dance card: One step Pauline, Fox trot Arline, Waltz Pauline…”</p><p>“It’s frustrating because I don’t know how it ends. I searched, but there is no information about him anywhere. Other than these scrapbooks, he left no trace.”</p><p>Through my own inquiries, I was able to find out a little more about Francis Saunders Spon.</p><p>On the night of March 19th, 1921, his overcoat was stolen.</p><p>According to census records, he became a salesman, though what he sold is not mentioned.</p><p>In 1925, he married a woman named Isabelle who won prizes for her gardening.</p><p>On March 2nd, 1951, he returned from a trip to Bermuda.</p><p>He died in November of 1981, childless, and seemingly without an obituary.</p><p>Scattered facts like these and the volumes that Ahmad owns are perhaps all that remains of one man’s life.</p><p>For Walker, that kind of impermanence is something she experiences in her own life as well. “To be honest, I feel like I die every day. Today I am me, and tomorrow I'll wake up as someone else. I was in so much grief a year ago, that I was unrecognizable. I looked at pictures of myself as a reminder of who I am—of who I have been on different days. Sometimes, it's so hard to remember what was meaningful. Seeing it visually really does help me stay consistent and integrated. It's incredibly reassuring.”</p><p align="center">* * *</p><p>Back at the Hell’s Kitchen flea market, I sat at a booth with Rotenberg. I watched as the professional translator sifted images with the dexterity of a black jack dealer. “Snapshot collectors are like whales straining plankton out of seawater,” he mused.</p><p>As opposed to the calculating composition of an art photograph, Rotenberg values the sincerity of a snapshot. “A snapshot is something we feel we must trust: it lacks the extra layer of complication that intrudes itself when [something] is made to be put before the public.”</p><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="499" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/09/Snapshot_from_the_authors_collection_2/82313071b.jpg" width="303"><figcaption class="caption">A photo of two women from the author’s collection<br>
(Courtesy of Roc Morin)</figcaption></figure><p>His work has provided him with an intimate knowledge of the past. “In early snapshots,” he noticed, “groups of women often arrange themselves horizontally—in a ‘chorus line’—and men vertically—in a pyramid. Beach shots of women draped with kelp seem to end around 1930. Women these days rarely turn away from the camera to display their hair, as was popular until perhaps 1950.”</p><p>However, despite all of his experience combing through the endless stockpiles of “babies, birthdays, and beaches,” Rotenberg still cannot explain exactly what he seeks. He knows what it feels like when he finds it though—a jolt of surprise that “seems to enlarge me, just a little, in a very personal sense.”</p><p>For Walker, the experience is visceral. “When I see a picture I don't like, I actually have a slight gagging feeling in the back of my throat. When I see one I like, a feeling of relaxation washes over me. It’s like falling in love.”</p><p>Rotenberg brought each snapshot as close as he could to his eyes. He squinted through a magnifying glass–still, he could only get so close. The pictures, small and inert are, in his words, “like music that can’t be turned up.”</p><p>“What I look for most of all is an unsolvable problem,” he concluded. “The answer is lost in the past.”</p><p>That quality of absence is a common motif. “Every snapshot collector I’ve met seems to be missing something in their life, or trying to replace something that was lost,” the documentary filmmaker <a href="http://www.other-peoples-pictures.com/">Lorca Shepperd</a> said. She herself buys class pictures and images of kids at their first communion, because they remind her of her childhood.</p><p>There is another woman who hunts for smiling babies, and a man who seeks only photographers’ shadows. Daguerreotype dealer Erin Waters keeps an assortment of handsome Civil War soldiers for herself filed under the heading “Dead Men I’m in Love With.” Other specialties: celebrants throwing rice at weddings, people with their heads cut out, pictures of Hawaii.</p><p>The lawyer David Rheingold seems intent on recreating the world in miniature. His collection of 60,000 painstakingly catalogued images spans 2,280 precise categories. Under “Groups,” within the subsection “Groups with some affinity (note: overlap with Family)” can be found the sub-sub-sections of “like a party,” “with costumes,” “holding ancestor photos,” “photos with photos added,” “conga line,” and “something special going on.”</p><p>Back in Lenchner’s private museum, his family portrait rests on a table among other fragments—seemingly random snapshots of a nude couple posing awkwardly, a lighthouse, a train wreck, Che Guevara drinking a Coke, and a pile of corpses. All they have in common is that Lenchner chose them. </p><p>Alongside his carefully cataloged assemblage, there is also by default a collection in a negative sense, almost inconceivable in scope, made up of all the photographs that he did not choose.</p><p>“I used to be upset to think that somebody cherished these images once,” he remarked, “and I flip through, so cavalier, thinking, ‘Boring, boring, boring,’ when of course, to the original owners, they were anything but boring.”</p><p>Asked if he would have selected his own family portrait, had he not known the people in it, the collector hesitated. “Probably not,” he confessed.</p><p>Lenchner’s greatest fixation is intimate Nazi images: SS officers with their wives and children, soldiers of the Wehrmacht on holiday, gaggles of lanky teenagers flashing Heil Hitler salutes. Lenchner is so primed to looking for fascist symbology in his searches, that he admits to periodically seeing swastikas where there are none. For him, the photographs serve to demystify Nazism by demonstrating what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.”</p><p>Lenchner picked up a snapshot from the table. There were four seemingly dead bodies in civilian clothing. Three lay crumpled at the base of a tree. The fourth, apparently a woman, lay on a table. In the background, a group of soldiers can be seen walking towards a locomotive. The collector described the scene as “a little massacre, with what I believe is a rape. This is surely a woman with her babushka. She's laid on this table with her legs splayed, and she's been made a little comfortable with some straw under her head. I think everybody's dead here: bodies, bodies, bodies. And, the Germans are done now. They're heading to what looks like a small train station. Their backs are all turned away. ‘We've done our work and now we're leaving.’"</p><p><em>(Note: The image below contains graphic content.)</em></p><figure class="left"><img alt="" height="412" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/09/Dan_Lenchner_massacre_photograph/55d18f269.jpg" width="630"><figcaption class="caption">(Courtesy of Dan Lenchner)</figcaption></figure><p>That is what Lenchner sees, and yet it is impossible to know for certain how much of that narrative is true. Other collectors have looked at the same photograph and seen Soviet soldiers, and a woman who died, unviolated, as her wounds were being tended.</p><p align="center">* * *</p><p>Whereas Lenchner seeks a story, even to the point of projecting his own, for Rotenberg, stories are a distraction. If the sellers possess contextual information about the photographs, he prefers not to know it. Though none of the snapshots were created by him, grouped together, an aesthetic emerges that is distinctly that of the collector. Rotenberg’s universe is filled with ineptly-positioned bodies, shadows, blurs, distant figures, and cropped out faces.</p><p>Rotenberg regards his collection as a kind of photography-by-proxy. “The snapshot corpus is a gigantic source of pictures that I might have taken but didn’t,” he stated. “What I choose from that material has got to mean something. It simply must. I’m not a machine.”</p><p>In his role as collector and artist, Rotenberg replaces the original meaning of the snapshot with his own. “The people who took these pictures had a different purpose than ours,” he said. “We know why the pictures were taken for the most part, and we are not respecting that. We are warping them. We are deliberately misunderstanding them. I honestly think that if most of the people who took these pictures ever saw what we were doing with them they would be outraged.”</p><p>“How would you want your own family photographs to be handled after you die?” I asked. “Should they be treated as human remains? Should they be buried or cremated?”</p><p>“I wouldn’t want someone to do with them what we do,” he replied.</p><p>Apprehensive about the power of images, Rotenberg prefers not to appear in photographs himself. In the one picture he did allow me to take, he is holding a snapshot in front of his face. The image itself features another man refusing to be photographed—a man with his hand over his own face.</p><p>The power of images is something that Ahmad, the art director and snapshot collector, has also sensed, in his own way. Weeping into his hands, he recounted the death of his partner David from AIDS after a decade-long struggle. Ahmad had been there through it all, with his camera, documenting everything: a last party, a final walk outdoors, David on a gurney with tubes going in and out.</p><p>“When they came to take the body,” he continued, “I had my camera. I took pictures of him being put in the coroner’s van. And, in the funeral home, by myself, I took a death portrait of him. I never showed it to anyone. It felt important to document it, even if no one was ever going to look at it. He lived and he died—and this is what happened.”</p><p>Ahmad paused to rub away the tears, to harden his face, to breathe. “After that, I stopped taking photographs. Everything became meaningless. Somehow, maybe I thought that taking these pictures would save him. It didn’t. Whatever I thought that photographs did—it wasn’t true. Everything will cease to exist. In five billion years, the sun will explode and it all will be incinerated.”</p><p align="center">* * *</p><p>My own introduction to photography began when I was three or four. I was abnormally averse to destruction: kids stepping on ants, piñatas smashed, Christmas trees discarded after the holidays. For months, I refused to eat anything without drawing it first to preserve it—then drawing it again after every bite, because it had become something new. My mother gave me a camera so I could preserve the beautiful ephemera of my life—and it helped. It helped, until I discovered that instead of the infinite film roll she claimed was inside, it was empty.</p><p>A decade later, I began to fill a similar void with the snapshots of others. Flea market vendors would ask what I was looking for, but all I could say was, “I’ll know it when I see it.” Intuitively, I felt as though I were assembling a trove of moments that needed to be saved, to the extent that I even merged the most treasured photographs from my own past into it. Shuffled together, my life dissolved undifferentiated into the lives of others.</p><p>Sitting across from Walker on the day of our interview, I offered to show her my snapshot collection. It seemed only fair to reciprocate. At the end of our talk, I handed her the box without further comment. She quickly formed her own impressions.</p><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="445" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/09/Snapshot_from_the_authors_collection_4/ac410e4cd.jpg" width="347"><figcaption class="caption">Another photo from the author’s collection<br>
(Courtesy of Roc Morin)</figcaption></figure><p>“There are a lot of costumes or uniforms—a lot of artifice, whether it's in the staging of an opera with the false intimacy of actors, or with this bullfight, or these women play-wrestling. There is also a theme of false creatures: the papier-mâché dragon, the carousel horse, the zoo elephant, the mermaid sand sculpture. Even this mountain scene looks like part of a movie set.”</p><p>“I feel as though my palm is being read,” I quipped.</p><p>Walker continued her appraisal. “It's very clear that one person collected these,” she added, sweeping a hand over the table. “You're definitely here in some way.”</p><p>By the time she had finished, the collector had sorted my photographs into several piles. The stack closest to her was made up of the ones she liked best–the images she would have bought herself. Glancing through them, her aesthetic was unmistakable. She was there, suddenly, in that assortment. I was in it too. And yet, neither of us were there at all.</p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedRoc MorinAmelia Walker with her collection of snapshotsThe People Who Collect Strangers' Memories 2016-09-26T12:23:25-04:002016-10-13T18:16:56-04:00In gathering old photographs of daily life, family scenes, and illness, hobbyists get an intimate view into past lives.tag:theatlantic.com,2016:50-471603<p>By the time drug-policy lawyer Charlotte Walsh took to the stage on the final day of the recent <a href="http://horizonsnyc.org/">Horizons Psychedelic Conference</a>, we had already heard several persuasive talks on the benefits of psychedelic substances. Rick Doblin had spoken about the successful treatment of <a href="http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v12n3/12305dob.html">PTSD</a> with MDMA, Draulio Barros de Araujo described his work combatting <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287208155_Antidepressant_Effects_of_a_Single_Dose_of_Ayahuasca_in_Patients_With_Recurrent_Depression_A_SPECT_Study">depression</a> with ayahuasca, and Stephen Ross discussed his study administering psilocybin to cancer patients.</p><p>I had met Ross two years prior, while covering his psychedelic <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/chemo-for-the-spirit-lsd-helps-cancer-patients-cope-with-death/360625/?utm_source=feed">research</a>. The psychiatrist had spent years and a small fortune obtaining the government’s permission to run an extremely limited study. The stakes were high. Without exemptions from the DEA and other agencies, Ross and his NYU team could have faced punishments as severe as life imprisonment. But the risk was worth it: The researchers were able to critically reduce end-of-life anxiety in the vast majority of their patients with targeted therapy aided by a single dose of psilocybin.</p><p>These clinical gains run counter to increasingly prohibitive trends exemplified by Holland’s 2008 ban on hallucinogenic mushrooms and the U.K.’s <a href="http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2015-16/psychoactivesubstances.html">Psychoactive Substances Act of 2016</a>. This recent law automatically renders illegal all substances capable of altering emotions or mental functioning unless specifically exempted.</p><p>According to Charlotte Walsh of the anti-prohibitionist <a href="http://ayahuascadefense.com/">Ayahuasca Defense Fund</a>, that kind of blanket drug prohibition is a violation of international human-rights law. Walsh sees parallels between the drug war and the legal battles for racial equality, as well as gay and reproductive rights. She and her colleagues across Europe and North America hope to use the U.S. Bill of Rights and the European Charter on Human Rights to build a cognitive-liberty-based case against drug prohibition.</p><p>I spoke with Walsh recently about her current efforts and the prospects for success at home and abroad.</p><hr><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What would a human-rights-based drug defense look like?</p><p><strong>Walsh:</strong> Generally, when people are prosecuted for psychedelic use, the defense focuses on technicalities rather than challenging the prohibitive framework itself. On the rare occasions when they do challenge prohibition, they tend to employ a rights-based framework—namely, arguing that their client’s human rights have been infringed by psychedelic drug prohibition. Rights-based defenses have historically been either pleas for therapeutic or religious exemptions from prohibition.</p><p><strong>Morin:</strong> What is the legal basis for drug prohibition?</p><p><strong>Walsh: </strong>Within the parameters of the U.K. Misuse of Drugs Act [equivalent to the U.S. Controlled Substances Act] the issue is ostensibly based around the idea of harm. We have an Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which is a group of scientists in different realms that the government consults when a drug is going to be scheduled or reclassified. The council then carries out a wholesale review of the substance and makes a recommendation for or against prohibition or reclassification. There has been a trend though where the government will ask the Advisory Council to carry out such a review and then just completely ignore their results and do what they want to do. As a stark example, when MDMA was being reevaluated for reclassification, before the results were even in, they issued a public statement saying, effectively, “Don't worry, whatever they find, we’re not going to change anything.”</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What results have they been ignoring?</p><p><strong>Walsh:</strong> There was an extensive <a href="http://www.sg.unimaas.nl/_OLD/oudelezingen/dddsd.pdf">U.K. government study</a> carried out in 2010 by a team under David Nutt that measured various substances in terms of harms to society and the individual. That study showed that alcohol is the overall forerunner in terms of harm, and tobacco comes close after that. A lot of the Class A drugs [equivalent to Schedule I in the US] and psychedelic drugs in particular were at the opposite end of that scale showing very low risk of harm.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Did the government refute the study or did they ignore it?</p><p><strong>Walsh: </strong>They basically ignored it. In relation to the alcohol and tobacco findings, obviously nobody has called for their prohibition. An alcohol user can alter their consciousness freely despite the proven risks while a psychedelic user faces heavy punishment. It’s arbitrary discrimination. The government’s response to the Nutt study has been that drug policy isn’t based solely on science, it's also based on cultural and historical precedent.</p><p><strong>Morin:</strong> Is that an admission that the harm-based justification for prohibition no longer applies?</p><p><strong>Walsh:</strong> It’s certainly evidence that it’s applied inconsistently and arbitrarily. From a human-rights-based perspective, everybody’s rights should be protected equally unless there’s a good reason why you're treating a group differently. I don’t think that saying “culturally and historically this is what we’ve always done” is legitimate. You can’t say that about racial discrimination, for instance.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>So, the current argument is that illegal drugs are bad because they’re illegal?</p><p><strong>Walsh: </strong>Basically, and it goes beyond that. We have a recently elected Conservative government in the U.K., and they’ve produced something called the Psychoactive Substances Act. It’s a piece of legislation that renders it unlawful to trade in any substance capable of producing a psychoactive effect of any kind regardless of harm or benefit. If you read the text of the Act, it’s extraordinary, most notably its lack of any reference to the concept of harm.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How do they define “psychoactive” exactly?</p><p><strong>Walsh: </strong>Any substance that alters your emotional state or mental functioning. It openly states that we [the government] think we have the right to stop you from altering your psychological state. It’s strange that’s something they believe they should have the power to do.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>I assume there are exemptions for alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine.</p><p><strong>Walsh:</strong> Yes, for culturally accepted substances. This legislation is potentially so broad that prior to its enactment the government felt compelled to write to bishops to reassure them that the incense used in church services would not become illegal, despite its being mildly psychoactive.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What does that kind of blanket ban indicate to you in terms of legislative intent?</p><p><strong>Walsh: </strong>The tradition in English law was always to intervene as little as possible. That concept has been dying in more recent years. This reverses that presumption, replacing it with an assumption that you can’t do something unless the government explicitly says you can. This violates classic liberalism, where you have the concept of limitations of power, as most famously espoused by legal theorist John Stuart Mill. How much power can the state legitimately hold over the individual? Mill laid down the principle as prevention of harm to others. So, from that perspective, the kind of paternalism we’re seeing, both in the operation of the Misuse of Drugs Act and the fundamental aims of this new piece of legislation is illegitimate.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Paternalism in terms of protecting people from themselves?</p><p><strong>Walsh:</strong> Exactly. It's inherently infantilizing. Even if you could make a case for that kind of paternalism, how can imprisonment possibly be for our own good? In the majority of cases, the primary and often only harm being suffered by the individual is due to the punishment imposed rather than from the substance use itself.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How do you intend to build a human-rights case against drug prohibition?</p><p><strong>Walsh: </strong>There are different ways in which you can approach it. Article 8 [in the European Convention on Human Rights] guarantees the right to privacy. In Mexico, there was a <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/11/mexico-marijuana-legal-human-right/415017/?utm_source=feed">Supreme Court ruling</a> that for individuals to grow and use cannabis was a human right connected to the right to privacy. Here in the U.K. recently, there was an <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11810347/Taking-drugs-is-a-human-right-say-MPs-and-peers.html">all-party parliamentary group</a> looking at drug-policy reform, and one of the things that they said is that drug-possession laws are potentially a breach of our Article 8 right to privacy. That’s the first time I've ever seen an official source using that kind of human rights-based argument. I think that is a really promising development.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>The suggestion is that drug use should be a private choice?</p><p><strong>Walsh: </strong>It should be a private choice as long as it doesn’t harm others. The vast majority of police stops and searches in our streets are for drugs rather than anything else, which is an obvious violation of privacy. Read more broadly, the right to privacy equates with our ability to become who we want to be. Mill, again, was a strong proponent of experiments in living as an important means for self-discovery. The question is, should we be entrusting the government to determine what’s valuable to us? It’s through our own choices, including whether or not to ingest substances, that we engage in a process of self-creation.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>It seems like there are stronger laws in place to prevent a patient from being medicated against their will than there are permitting self-medication. How similar are those two concepts?</p><p><strong>Walsh: </strong>It’s based on the same argument—the freedom to control your own consciousness and the mechanisms of your thinking. With psychedelics, it’s one of those areas where people who have experienced profound alterations of consciousness will often see merit in these arguments, and people who haven’t are often not very open to them. I think you have to be very careful about how you construct your argument. It's about liberty. It's about an abuse of state powers. You want to get people on board who are aren’t necessarily interested in altering their consciousness, but who are interested in curbing what the state can and can’t do.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Medical arguments have broadly relaxed prohibition of marijuana in this country. Do you see that extending further?</p><p><strong>Walsh: </strong>I do, but I also think that the medical model is problematic in its own right. I think we need more of a holistic definition of health. Right now, we’re talking about simply the absence of illness—whether it’s physical or mental. We should be talking about allowing individuals to flourish, to develop beyond basic well-being.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Besides the right to privacy, what other rights do you see influencing the legitimacy of prohibition?</p><p><strong>Walsh: </strong>Article 9 guarantees religious freedom, so, basically, if you consider the drug you use to be a sacrament, then banning it is a form of religious persecution. In the States, you have a more doctrinal approach to what constitutes a religion. There’s a test. Is there a holy book and a central belief system? There’s a list of things you can work through. In Europe, we don’t have that. We have this loose interpretation of what religious belief is. It can even cover atheism, for example. Indeed, any belief system of significance to you can potentially be covered. The court tends to accept that, but then they say that your ability to manifest that religious belief—for example by drinking ayahuasca—has to be balanced against the public interest in you not doing it. And so, in cases involving ayahuasca, they’ve said that its illegality is proof of its danger, which in and of itself proves that the public interest in your not taking it outweighs your interest in taking it. It’s a circular argument that renders the whole process absolutely meaningless.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Taking your example, can you talk about why someone would want to use ayahuasca?</p><p><strong>Walsh: </strong>There have been a lot of studies, and the overall conclusion seem to be that the long-term <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0042421">psychological well-being</a> of people who use it is actually higher than control groups who have never used it. It has thousands of years of cultural history behind it. Then, of course you have the anecdotal evidence of many individuals saying that using ayahuasca has been a very beneficial and transformative experience.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>A lot of people seem to think that the religious argument has the best chance of succeeding here in the U.S.</p><p><strong>Walsh: </strong>Right. It has already been successful in the U.S. Courts have allowed exemptions in certain cases with ayahuasca, and with the <a href="http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/21cfr/cfr/1307/1307_31.htm">Native American Church</a> and peyote. There have been similar rulings in other countries—Holland and Chile, for example, but nothing like that here in the U.K. Interestingly, in the U.K., judges rejecting human-rights arguments have argued that they are bound by the international system of drug prohibition and therefore can’t make exemptions. In U.S. courts though, that sort of argument has been discarded with barely a second glance. The prosecution has raised the fact that exemptions are against international law and the judiciary has said that it doesn't trump religious freedom.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>If religious freedom is weaker in the U.K., is there a freedom of speech argument that could be made instead?</p><p><strong>Walsh: </strong>More broadly under Article 9 is the right to freedom of thought, which is closely linked to freedom of speech, given that our thoughts precede our speech. From that perspective, the idea is that we should be allowed to think what we want—and it’s not just the actual contents of thinking that are important here, but also the processes of thinking. If psychedelics and other drugs can allow you to access different mind states, by preventing access, we’re interfering with true freedom of thought. These substances, as precursors, allow you to think in entirely different ways—which can be beneficial. The idea that psychedelics can actually improve an individual’s life is rarely taken into account, and taking them because they give pleasure is not even considered—as if pleasure were something to be ashamed of. The individual shouldn’t be required to prove that these substances are risk-free, because few things in life are—rather it should be up to the state to prove, with scientific evidence, that the risks justify the damage to our civil liberties. In the absence of that, it is impossible that say that this is truly a free society.</p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedReutersEcstasy pills, which contain MDMA as their main chemicalDo Psychedelic Drug Laws Violate Human Rights?2016-03-04T10:35:07-05:002016-03-04T10:37:51-05:00The prohibition of MDMA and hallucinogenic mushrooms restricts &quot;cognitive liberty,&quot; according to some activists.tag:theatlantic.com,2016:50-463308<p>Every particle in the universe is accounted for. The precise shape and position of every blade of grass on every planet has been calculated. Every snowflake and every raindrop has been numbered. On the screen before us, mountains rise sharply and erode into gently rolling hills, before finally subsiding into desert. Millions of years pass in an instant.</p><p>Here, in a dim room half an hour south of London, a tribe of programmers sit bowed at their computers, creating a vast digital cosmos. Or rather, through the science of procedural generation, they are making a program that allows a universe to create itself.</p><p>The ambitious project will be released as a video game this June under the title No Man’s Sky. In the game, randomly-placed astronauts isolated from one another by millions of lightyears must find their own existential purpose as they traverse a galaxy of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets.</p><p>“The physics of every other game—it’s faked,” the chief architect Sean Murray explained. “When you’re on a planet, you’re surrounded by a skybox—a cube that someone has painted stars or clouds onto. If there is a day to night cycle, it happens because they are slowly transitioning between a series of different boxes.” The skybox is also a barrier beyond which the player can never pass. The stars are merely points of light. In No Man’s Sky however, every star is a place that you can go. The universe is infinite. The edges extend out into a lifeless abyss that you can plunge into forever.</p><p>“With us,” Murray continued, “when you're on a planet, you can see as far as the curvature of that planet. If you walked for years, you could walk all the way around it, arriving back exactly where you started. Our day to night cycle is happening because the planet is rotating on its axis as it spins around the sun. There is real physics to that. We have people that will fly down from a space station onto a planet and when they fly back up, the station isn't there anymore; the planet has rotated. People have filed that as a bug.”</p><p>On the monitor before us, cryptic fragments of source code flash by. While earthly physicists still struggle to find a unified mathematical framework for all phenomena—the No Man’s Sky equivalent already exists. Before us are the laws of nature for an entire cosmos in 600,000 lines.</p><p>The universe begins with a single input, an arbitrary numerical seed—the phone number of one of the programmers. That number is mathematically mutated into more seeds by a cascading series of algorithms—a computerized pseudo-randomness generator. The seeds will determine the characteristics of each game element. Machines, of course, are incapable of true randomness, so the numbers produced appear random only because the processes that create them are too complex for the human mind to comprehend.</p><p>Physicists still debate whether our own universe is deterministic or random. While some scientists believe that quantum mechanics almost certainly involves indeterminacy, Albert Einstein famously favored the opposing position, saying, “God does not play dice.” No Man’s Sky does not play dice either. Once the first seed number is entered into the void within the program, the universe is unalterably established—every star, planet, and organism. The past, present, and future are fixed indelibly, with change to the system only possible from a force outside the system itself—in this case, the player.</p><p>In one sense, because of the game’s procedural design, the entire universe exists at the moment of its creation. In another sense, because the game only renders a player’s immediate surroundings, nothing exists unless there is a human there to witness it.</p><p>“Whatever is around you,” Murray mused, “it actually doesn't matter whether it exists or not, because even the things you don’t see are still going about their business. Creatures on a distant planet that nobody has ever visited are drinking from a watering hole or falling asleep because they’re following a formula that determines where they go and what they do; we just don’t run the formula for a place until we get there.”</p><p>The creatures are generated through the procedural distortion of archetypes, and each given their own unique behavioral profiles. “There is a list of objects that animals are aware of,” Artificial Intelligence programmer Charlie Tangora explained. “Certain animals have an affinity for some objects over others which is part of giving them personality and individual style. They have friends and best friends too. It's just a label on a bit of code—but another creature of the same type nearby is potentially their friend. They ask their friends telepathically where they’re going so they can coordinate.”</p><p>While the basic behaviors themselves are simple, the interactions can be impressively complex. Artistic director Grant Duncan recalled roaming an alien planet once shooting at birds out of boredom. “I hit one and it fell into the ocean,” he recalled. “It was floating there on the waves when suddenly, a shark came up and ate it. The first time it happened, it totally blew me away.”</p><p><span style="line-height: 1.66667;">The team programmed some of the physics for aesthetic reasons. For instance, Duncan insisted on permitting moons to orbit closer to their planets than Newtonian physics would allow. When he desired the possibility of green skies, the team had to redesign the periodic table to create atmospheric particles that would diffract light at just the right wavelength.</span></p><p>“Because it’s a simulation,” Murray stated. “there’s so much you can do. You can break the speed of light—no problem. Speed is just a number. Gravity and its effects are just numbers. It’s our universe, so we get to be Gods in a sense.”</p><p>Even Gods though, have their limitations. The game’s interconnectivity means that every action has a consequence. Minor adjustments to the source code can cause mountains to unexpectedly turn into lakes, species to mutate, or objects to lose the property of collision and plummet to the center of a planet. “Something as simple as altering the color of a creature,” Murray noted, “can cause the water level to rise.”</p><figure><img alt="" height="354" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/02/slack_imgs_1/997cd3315.png" width="630"><figcaption class="credit">No Man’s Sky</figcaption></figure><p>As in nature itself, the same formulas emerge again and again—often in disparate places. Particularly prolific throughout No Man’s Sky (and nature) is the use of fractal geometry—repeating patterns that manifest similarly at every level of magnification. “If you look at a leaf very closely,” Murray illustrated, “there is a main stock running through the center with little tributaries radiating out. Farther away, you’ll see a similar pattern in the branches of the trees. You’ll see it if you look at the landscape, as streams feed into larger rivers. And, farther still—there are similar patterns in a galaxy.”</p><p>“When I go out in nature, I don’t even see terrain anymore,” the programmer laughed. “All I see are mathematical functions and graphs. I’ll pick up a stone and begin thinking about the shape of it. What formula could have given you that?”</p><p>I mentioned to Murray that I am doing a project collecting <a href="http://www.facebook.com/worlddreamatlas">dreams from around the world</a>, and asked about his. The programmer reported recurring scenes in which the real world appeared to be just a computer program. That possibility is being seriously considered by many scientists, including a team of physicists from the University of Bonn who recently published <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847">evidence</a> in support of it. “Elon Musk questioned me about that,” Murray recalled. “He asked, ‘What are the chances that we’re living in a simulation?’”</p><p>The programmer considered the thought before offering a hedge. “My answer,” he said, “was basically that, even if it is a simulation, it’s a good simulation, so we shouldn’t question it. I’m working on my dream game, for instance. I’m more happy than I am sad. Whoever is running the simulation must be smarter than I am, and since they’ve created a nice one, then presumably they are benevolent and want good things for me.”</p><p>I rang up Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the nearby University of Oxford. Bostrom is a longtime proponent of the idea that it’s possible we are living in a simulation. “If the simulation hypothesis is true,” I asked him, “what implications would that have for our existence?”</p><p>“One might be the idea of an afterlife,” he said. “From a naturalistic understanding, when we die we basically rot. But if we are in a simulation, if you stop the program, you can restart it again. You can take data created by one program and enter it into another without violating any laws of nature.”</p><p>“If this world is a simulation,” I asked, “What does that say about our creators?”</p><p>“There might be different motives,” Bostrom acknowledged. “In many ways it has parallels with reconciling evil in the world with an omnipotent and benevolent God. You could say that we are not created by someone who wanted the best for the world, or you could say that all of this suffering is illusory, or you could try to concoct some explanation for why it's actually necessary. Either way, there’s an intellectual challenge there.”</p><p>“As a creator yourself,” I asked Murray back at No Man’s Sky headquarters, “How benevolent are you?”</p><p>“Well, we don't have blood in our universe. That’s pretty nice. We don’t have cities full of urban problems. We have nice beautiful landscapes more often than not.”</p><p>In No Man’s Sky, there is also no sickness, no excrement, and no birth. There is death, but always with the assurance of reincarnation. “When you die, you regenerate in the same location,” Murray explained, “but you do lose a great deal of things. We wanted the loss to be meaningful—for you to know that if you make a decision, it has significance.”</p><p>The poignancy of death extends to other creatures as well. “The nature of video games is conflict,” Murray insisted. “It’s an interesting reflection of where we've gotten to. With our game though, you give someone a controller, they land on a planet, they see an alien creature, and if it’s their first time playing, they will probably shoot it even though they have just gone through a journey to get there. What I really like though, is that nine times out of ten, people suddenly feel bad that they’ve done it. You don’t get points for killing. There are no gold coins. You chose to do that.”</p><p>The player has no alter ego to hide behind either. “In most games, you begin by choosing a character,” Murray described. “Often you’ll be cast as an unlikable character with a dozen catchphrases. You’ll have a nickname like Irish or Tex. You’re made to decide at the beginning who you are, but that might be before you decide how you really want to play. We want to let people have their imagination. They can be whoever they want to be. They might be an alien if that’s what they want to believe. I quite like that.”</p><p>In a universe designed without mirrors, as this one is, the only way that you could ever view yourself would be to ask another player to look at you and describe what they see. Considering the inconceivable vastness of this cosmos however, for two humans to ever chance upon one another would be an almost impossible event—one capable of evoking real awe.</p><p>For the No Man’s Sky team, that feeling of awe is exactly the point. In the words of programmer Hazel McKendrick, “You’re not the God of this universe. You're not all powerful. You can’t build a gun so big that you're unstoppable. You should be small and a little bit scared, I think, all the time.”</p><p>Murray traces this feeling of sublime obliteration to his childhood deep in the Australian outback. “My parents managed this big ranch of one and a quarter million acres. It had a gold mine. It had seven airstrips. You don’t get there by road—you have to fly in. We were very much on our own, and we went out every morning to check that the machines that were keeping us alive were still working. It was the closest thing to the surface of Mars. We were alone for hundreds and hundreds of miles. There was just this incredible feeling—knowing that you’re this little dot in this massive landscape.”</p><p>“The very first thing we talked about when we were planning this game was emotion,” Murray continued. “That emotion of landing on a planet and knowing that no one else has ever been there before. There is a very deep human quality of needing to explore. When other games have exploration, everything has already been built by someone. There is a vocabulary. Certain doors will open and certain doors won’t, and when the door opens, it probably has a little secret inside—a secret shared by thousands of other players that have been there before.”</p><p>Through the use of procedural generation, No Man’s Sky ensures that each planet will be a surprise, even to the programmers. Every creature, AI-guided alien spacecraft, or landscape is a pseudo-random product of the computer program itself. The universe is essentially as unknown to the people who made it as it is to the people who play in it—and ultimately, it is destined to remain that way.</p><p>“People will stop playing long before even .1 percent of everything has been discovered,” Murray reflected. “That’s just how games are. I would be foolish to think anything else. It’s a sad thought though. When we fly through the galactic map, we see all the stars, each of which will have planets around them, and life, and ecology—and the vast, vast, vast majority will never be visited. At some point the servers will be shut down. It will all be turned off, and it will be us who pull the plug.”</p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedNo Man's SkyInside the Artificial Universe That Creates Itself2016-02-18T10:32:55-05:002016-03-04T15:29:13-05:00A team of programmers has built a self-generating cosmos, and even they don&rsquo;t know what&rsquo;s hiding in its vast reaches.tag:theatlantic.com,2016:50-433803<p>The village had no name. Everyone who had known the name of the village was now dead or had fled. When the Kurdish peshmerga fighters had recaptured the settlement from ISIS that spring, it was so full of booby-traps that they just torched the place rather than deal with it. The town was abandoned now—just somewhere for the men to come scavenge.</p><p>“This one’s my house,” Christopher Smith grinned. The former Marine corporal gestured with his battered AK-47 toward a fire-gutted jungle-green villa. All the buildings were like that—vibrant non-sequiturs of blue, yellow, purple. “It’s like Super Mario World,” the 25-year-old remarked.</p><p>While thousands of Europeans and North Americans have joined ISIS, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/magazine/meet-the-american-vigilantes-who-are-fighting-isis.html?_r=0">at least a hundred</a> Westerners have enlisted as fighters against the terrorist group. Compelled by reports of the Islamic State’s gruesome activities, the first volunteers came in the fall of 2014. They have enrolled in a number of regional militias including the peshmerga—the government-backed army of Iraqi Kurdistan under which Smith currently serves.</p><!-- START "MORE ON" SINGLE STORY BOX v. 2 --><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><!-- END "MORE ON" SINGLE STORY BOX v. 2 --><p>The village we walked through was slowly turning back into desert—disappearing by the truckload as its wreckage went to fortify the Mullah Abdullah frontlines two kilometers away. The end of Kurdistan is marked by a dull earthen rampart studded with the bright dreamland fragments of the nameless village. Seven hundred meters beyond, across a minefield, is the Islamic State.</p><p>Two months before that day in December, Smith had been a brick mason living in Vermont with a fiancée. That was all over now. “I took the wrong bus to Miami,” he joked. In fact, the American had flown to Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan, on a one-way ticket. With his military papers in hand, the veteran had walked into the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs and enlisted.</p><p>While there is no specific U.S. law against fighting with a force like the peshmerga, the State Department has explicitly <a href="http://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/collection/is-it-legal-to-go-overseas-and-fight-isis-20150324">discouraged</a> it. After he left, Smith said he called the FBI, notifying the agency of his whereabouts. “They knew I was here,” he insisted, “but they still felt the need to wake up my mother in the middle of the night and give her a heart attack.”</p><p>The American spoke of ISIS atrocities, the stories that had troubled his sleep back home: the beheadings and crucifixions, the slave markets, the rape camps—an evil that overwhelmed his senses. It was the reason he had come to fight, and like many of the volunteers I met, he was not here just to kill Daesh (a derogatory term for ISIS)—he was here to send Daesh to hell. The foreigners hunted wild boar to supplement their rice rations and made sure that every round fired in anger was coated in the animal’s unholy blood.</p><p>Hell is real here. The black inferno rages just beneath our feet, my translator warned. Everything is known from scripture. The flames have been measured, he insisted, and they are 69 times more painful than terrestrial flames.</p><p>There were always two wars going on—the one we could see, and the one we could not. Over 1,300 years ago, the prophet Muhammad spoke of the world’s final hour. The armies of Rome, he said, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/?utm_source=feed">will be lured</a> to the plains of Syria and annihilated. Only then will the Mahdi, the messiah, descend from heaven to defeat the cycloptic antichrist, Dajjal. Every phenomenon here is infused with mystical significance. ISIS distributes photographs of one-eyed babies, and the pesh commander at Makhmour, a hundred kilometers away, reports recurring nightmares of Kurdistan’s capital underwater—a city of corpses carried deep into the earth by an inescapable current.</p><figure><img alt="" height="420" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/01/Bird/dc5dd8baa.jpg" width="630"><figcaption class="caption">A censored mural of a raptor (Roc Morin)</figcaption></figure><p>There were always remnants of that other ethereal war. The Shia mosque here had once been decorated with murals of humans and animals, until the jihadists came to paint blue circles over every face. Depictions of living things are considered by radical Sunnis to be idolatry. On this wall, men with blue orbs for heads ride off into battle and a blue-headed raptor perches victoriously above his dead blue-headed prey.</p><p>“Angels do not enter a place where there are images,” my translator informed us. Then he started rapping, “I got my angels on my shoulders and a quarter of that angel dust.” The 30-year-old alternated continually between Quranic verse and Lil Wayne lyrics. “When I listen to Lil Wayne, I feel my faith decrease,” the pious Muslim lamented. “Sometimes I forsake him, but I always go back.”</p><p>Azad, a volunteer who identified himself only by his nom de guerre, had departed the land of Lil Wayne eight months prior. He left his family, his job, and his given name back in Texas. The 46-year-old said a prayer one night and the Lord directed him to join the YPG—a group of communist guerrillas in Syrian Kurdistan, separate from the peshmerga.</p><p>“You show up in [Iraq] at four in the morning with a $150,000 [ISIS] bounty on your head,” Azad recalled. “You’re supposed to meet someone in an airport parking lot, but you don’t know who. You’re in the back of a car, and every time it stops, you’re afraid you're going to end up on a milk carton. When you get to the safe house, you’re feeling a little bit better, but only when those guys go to sleep—only when you hear them snoring, can you kind of relax a little bit.” In his sleep-deprived mind, Azad conjured up a series of frightening scenarios. Maybe terrorists had killed his intended hosts and taken their place. Maybe his hosts were planning to sell him to ISIS themselves.</p><p>After being smuggled into Syria, the Texan was sent directly to the front. “I was never combat trained,” he confided, “so I worried that I wouldn’t be good enough. When I got there though, I realized that just by being an avid hunter I knew more than most of them did. My first thought was, ‘Great, I’m not the weakest link.’ Then I thought, ‘Fuck, I’m not the weakest link.’”</p><p>Azad recalled fighting with the YPG alongside former members of the French Foreign Legion and the American military. There was also a man, the Texan said, who claimed to be Special Forces but was actually a child molester. There was a Canadian lingerie model, and a Muslim convert who liked to kiss dead Daesh on the lips.</p><p>“It's turned into a fan club,” Azad grumbled, explaining why he had crossed back into Iraq and joined the pesh. “A lot of people come over here thinking they’re going to be John Wayne and Rambo running and gunning. It’s not like that.”</p><p>Nicholas Barrett, a former combat medic and self-described “proud American infidel,” detailed a typical day in Kurdistan. “You’ll have these commanders from different tribes who hate each other, and they’re just klicks apart across no-man’s land. They’re both on the same radios that they bought at the same bazaar in Dohuk. They have their morning prayers, drink chai, talk about each other's mothers, and then lob mortars for a few hours.”</p><p>The men have to find their own entertainment. The morning I arrived at Mullah Abdullah, Christian Österman was cursing. A teenaged pesh soldier had stolen one of his boots as a prank. With virtually no translators available, communication between the volunteers and their hosts was mostly hand signals and a smattering of Kurdish Sorani. “I told this guy that ‘asshole’ is a sign of respect—like ‘sir,’” Smith said, waving at the boot thief. “Hi, asshole!”</p><p>The men kept busy building redoubts, scavenging firewood, spray-painting graffiti of Daesh soldiers copulating with goats, and caring for what remained of a litter of puppies birthed by a local stray. A rival bitch had been sneaking onto the base to kill the puppies one by one, and now there was only a single scrawny mutt left.</p><p>At night, you could tell exactly where ISIS was by the glow of their cooking fires in the distant town. The Westerners would wait until all the little lights were glowing before flashing the positions with a laser pointer. They would laugh hysterically as the jihadists, fearing snipers, frantically doused the flames.</p><figure><img alt="" height="420" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/01/Daesh/5d56ea7d5.jpg" width="630"><figcaption class="caption">Christopher Smith, Christian Österman, and Angelo Sammantano at Mullah Abdullah (Roc Morin)</figcaption></figure><p>In the daylight, the town looked dead. There had been a black flag flying from a rooftop as recently as a week before, but it had vanished in a storm of French airstrikes. Today, the only sign of life came in the form of shrieking mortars, sent over at irregular intervals.</p><p>“You can tell generally where they’re going to land just by the sound,” Österman explained. The Swede had been in country for nearly five months. “When you hear that deep tone you know it's going to be pretty close.”</p><p>The men were so attuned to the signature trill that they sensed it through everything—conversation, engine noise, gunfire. By the time I heard it that morning, they were already on the ground waiting for the explosion. There was only silence. We raised our heads and looked around. It was a dud. The mortars are often bad and the ground is supple.</p><p>That evening, Smith and I hauled ourselves 100 feet up a radio tower to observe the enemy positions. The structure we climbed had been thoroughly scrapped of its most valuable metals by the pesh who had not been paid in four or five months. The men used to have a telescope, but the volunteer who brought it had taken it home with him to America. Now, we just peered through the jumpy optics of Smith’s AK at the floodplain stretching out before us, a still-life landscape of overgrown farms and ruined villages.</p><p>“If I was in charge,” the American reflected, “I'd bring in an EOD [Explosive Ordnance Disposal] team to clear a path and send everyone up in one straight line as fast as we could go. We’d take that spot beyond the river, and from there we’d be golden. I’d set up a .50 cal right in this tower, because from here we could hit everything. Unfortunately, we only have about 100 rounds in the truck. We just don't have the resources.”</p><p>As we prepared to climb down, Smith stood, chambered a round, and fired his AK into the vastness. The Westerners all had to buy their own bullets from the local arms market, and that shot had cost the American one dollar—about the same as a pack of Kurdish cigarettes.</p><p>When we hit the ground, the Frenchman Angelo Sammantano strode over. “That bitch ate the last puppy,” he reported, shaking his head.</p><p>Of all the men in that place, the American had loved those puppies the most. He had even made arrangements for an NGO to vaccinate one of them so he could bring the animal back to the States.</p><p>“Sorry man,” Sammantano added.</p><p>Smith patted his AK and glared at the contented killer lounging by the road. “We’re going on a walk tonight,” he swore.</p><p>On the Marine’s forearm was a tattoo of Atlas, straining to bear the impossible weight of a world engulfed in flames.</p><p>“Is that you?” I asked, pointing to the Titan.</p><p>“Maybe,” he said.</p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedRoc MorinWestern anti-ISIS volunteers in KurdistanThe Western Volunteers Fighting ISIS2016-01-29T10:27:15-05:002016-01-29T10:27:15-05:00<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?--><span>&ldquo;A lot of people come over here thinking they&rsquo;re going to be Rambo. It&rsquo;s not like that.&quot;</span>tag:theatlantic.com,2016:50-423324<p>“Being a pedophile is like living with a mask on,” Shin Takagi told me, before lighting another cigarette in the midst of a Tokyo cafe. Takagi’s mask was off today. He spoke freely and people were noticing. In a sea of black business suits, Takagi sported a red Hawaiian-print shirt<span>—</span>daring them to look.</p><p>People like Takagi who struggle with pedophilic impulses but have never acted on them have been the subject of much media attention. With a paucity of reliable scientific data about their circumstances and no known medical or psychiatric cure, many of these individuals rely strictly on self-control to avoid acting on their urges. Takagi believes there is another option.</p><p>Struggling to reconcile his attraction to children with a conviction that they should be protected, Takagi founded Trottla, a company that produces life-like child sex dolls. For more than a decade, Trottla has shipped anatomically-correct imitations of girls as young as five to clients around the world.</p><p>“We should accept that there is no way to change someone’s fetishes,” Takagi insisted. “I am helping people express their desires, legally and ethically. It’s not worth living if you have to live with repressed desire.”</p><p>Several treatments for pedophilia exist, including cognitive-behavioral therapy and chemical castration, and other interventions intended to suppress urges. A <a href="http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(11)61074-4/abstract">meta-analysis</a> conducted by the Mayo Clinic recently concluded that the treatments “do not change the pedophile’s basic sexual orientation toward children.” In addition, among people who have actually molested children, the study cites recidivism rates ranging from 10 percent to 50 percent. Takagi believes other methods of harm-reduction are warranted, and suggests his products could help.</p><p>So far, there is no research to indicate whether or not Takagi’s dolls would be successful, and Peter Fagan from the John Hopkins School of Medicine is skeptical that there ever will be. Citing cognitive-behavioral theory, the paraphilia researcher believes that contact with Trottla’s products would likely have a “<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18307171">reinforcing effect</a>” on pedophilic ideation and “in many instances, cause it to be acted upon with greater urgency.” The research Fagan cites to support that conclusion is based on offenders, so it is unclear whether the effects would be different for non-offenders.</p><p>Michael Seto from the University of Toronto speculated on the possible existence of two distinct populations of pedophiles. Drawing an analogy to methadone treatment for opioid addicts, the psychiatrist hypothesized that “for some pedophiles, access to artificial child pornography or to child sex dolls could be a safer outlet for their sexual urges, reducing the likelihood that they would seek out child pornography or sex with real children. For others, having these substitutes might only aggravate their sense of frustration.”</p><p>“We don’t know, because the research hasn’t been done,” he concluded. “But, it would be a very important study to conduct.”</p><p>Klaus Beier, the initiating scientist of the pedophile-prevention network Don’t Offend, has been investigating what differentiates pedophiles who act on their impulses from those who do not. “We can detect pedophilia by examining the activation patterns associated with sexual arousal through neuroimaging,” the sexologist noted. “The far more interesting question is<span>—</span>is the person able to control this behavior?”</p><p>In an fMRI study currently under review and financed by the German Ministry for Education and Research, Dr. Beier and his colleagues say they have found stronger connectivity in brain regions related to impulse control in pedophiles who have not offended compared with those who have. “Just because a person is pedophilically inclined,” Beier concluded, “doesn’t mean he is a danger.”</p><p>Even without supporting research, Takagi is convinced that his products save children. “I often receive letters from buyers,” he said. “The letters say, ‘Thanks to your dolls, I can keep from committing a crime.’ I hear statements like that from doctors, prep school teachers<span>—</span>even celebrities.”</p><p>While our meeting that day was brief, Takagi invited me to visit his mountain workshop the following afternoon. I met him, along with my translator Natsuko at the Hachioji train station, an hour north of Tokyo.</p><p>Takagi described most of his clients as “men living alone.” “The system of marriage is no longer working,” he said. “While most people buy dolls for sexual reasons, that soon changes for many of them. They start to brush the doll’s hair or change her clothing. Female clients buy the dolls to remind them of their past, or to reimagine an unfortunate childhood. Many of them begin to think of the dolls as their daughters. That’s why I never allow myself to be photographed. I want to prevent them from seeing me as the father of the dolls.”</p><p>The Trottla factory stands at the end of a remote gravel road, shrouded by trees. The building’s only neighbors are monkeys, birds, and wild boar. “We had to be out in the wilderness,” Takagi explained. “The machinery is loud and the materials flammable.”</p><p>Inside the dim interior, the stench of solvents was overpowering. Takagi admitted that the propriety solution he uses to replicate skin is a known carcinogen with toxic effects on the brain, liver, and kidneys.</p><p>“It is a very challenging environment,” he said. “That’s why all my employees are former military. They are only allowed to work with the poisonous material two days a week and must always wear a mask and gloves. I often wonder what will kill me first<span>—</span>cigarettes or this.”</p><p>Takagi hit a switch. The overhead flourescents flickered on, and suddenly we were not alone. At the far end of the room, hanging naked from metal stands were the dolls. “When I look at them in the middle of night, sometimes even I am frightened,” he admitted.</p><p>“Does she have a name?” I asked gesturing towards the nearest doll<span>—</span>a model he later described as a 10-to-12-year-old.</p><p>“There is no name,” he said, “just a code name<span>—</span>LP1.”</p><p>“What emotions do you see in her face?” I asked. </p><p>“This one looks like she’s sad,” he said. “One must make a variety of expressions to fulfill a variety of client needs.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>In Japan, where many have animist Shinto beliefs, the dolls have a complicated status. “In Shinto,” Takagi said, “everything has a soul. Even if you don't want the dolls anymore, you can’t abandon them. There is a special ceremony that is performed for them at a shrine. It’s like a ceremony for a dead person. Since dolls have a human form, they must be treated as such.”</p><p>He described a recent case in which a client who needed to get rid of a doll called, requesting his help. “He wanted me to dispose of it,” Takagi remembered. “But, he didn't say ‘dispose.<em>’</em> The phrase he used was ‘send back home.’”</p><p>At the end of our interview, as I was photographing a set of fiberglass molds, I noticed Takagi and my translator speaking in a corner.</p><p>“What were you talking about?” I asked her later.</p><p>“My husband died in a motorcycle crash several years ago,” she said. “I was asking Mr. Takagi how much it would cost to make a replica of him.”</p><p>We all walked out together, the same way we came in<span>—</span>passing a pile of discarded fiberglass skeletons waiting to be removed. These were the remains of some of the dolls that had been sent ‘back home.’ “They’re toxic,” Takagi explained. “So, we need a special company to come and pick them up. They have to be crushed with hammers. Everything with form must be broken eventually.”</p><p>On the drive back to the station, I asked Takagi if his work had changed the way he defined the real and the artificial.</p><p>“It is a common belief in Japan that dolls are mirrors,” he said. “The dolls show their owner’s true self.”</p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedJason Lee / ReutersCan Child Dolls Keep Pedophiles from Offending?2016-01-11T07:30:00-05:002018-02-20T12:45:55-05:00One man thinks so, and he’s been manufacturing them for clients for more than ten years.tag:theatlantic.com,2015:50-412249<p><span style="line-height: 1.66667;">Whips, chains, collars, gags, blindfolds, handcuffs, knives… My eyes roam the soundproof room in which we are enclosed. The subject of our conversation is BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Sadism, and Masochism), a discipline that includes a wide variety of consensual power-exchange activities suggested by the various implements on display.</span></p><p>“Whether they are soldiers or victims,” Leslie Rogers explains, “there is nothing that binds people together better than war. What I'm re-creating in BDSM is like war—but in re-creating war, I'm ending it. I'm going to a place with you where I shouldn't go, and we’ll meet there, and in the end we’ll realize that we are still capable of being loved.”</p><p>I am talking with Rogers in a dungeon beneath a cabin in Salinas, California. The burly 36-year-old has one hand on the bar of a jail cell. The other clutches the nape of his partner’s neck, 33-year-old Tani Thole.</p><p>“We come across as really straight and vanilla,” Thole noted with a grin. “I have this soccer-mom vibe, and Leslie has a businessman vibe. People are very surprised when they find out who we really are.”</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>The American Psychiatric Association has its own definition. Rogers, a self-identified dominant, enthusiastically endorses having “recurrent and intense sexual arousal from the physical or psychological suffering of another person.” In her desire to be the object of that suffering, Thole, a self-identified submissive, is his mirror image and ideal mate. Respectively, they meet all primary criteria for Sexual Sadism and Sexual Masochism Disorders.</p><p>However, rather than experiencing “significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning,” the pair credits their lifestyle with producing dramatic improvements in mental health. While conventional psychotherapists still debate the ethics of hugging their patients, Rogers and Thole have pioneered a form of intensive therapy that incorporates consensual BDSM activities into their sessions with clients. The objective is to activate repressed emotions in order to process them in a safe and supportive environment.</p><p>In order to better understand their technique, which they call <a href="http://www.lightdarkinstitute.com/">Light/Dark Therapy</a>, the couple invited me to participate in an immersion with them. For the next 48 hours, we will not leave this cabin.</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>While psychology has historically defined sadomasochism as strictly pathological, there is some research that supports Rogers and Thole’s perspective.</p><p>A study from the Netherlands found a greater prevalence of <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsm.12192/abstract">positive psychological traits</a> in BDSM practitioners than in the general public. The practitioners were less neurotic, more extraverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious, less rejection sensitive, and had higher subjective well-being.</p><p>A subsequent U.S. <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/28vud0iod10f4rc/Sagarin%20Cutler%20Cutler%20Lawler-Sagarin%20Matuszewich%20(2009).pdf">study</a> of BDSM-identified couples found reductions in self-reported stress and negative affect, as well as increases in intimacy following BDSM play.</p><p>According to Brad Sagarin, the effects can be even more profound. The psychologist’s latest paper investigates the potential for sadomasochistic activities to induce altered states of consciousness.</p><p>“Dominants show evidence of <i>flow</i>,” Sagarin explained, “a very pleasurable state that occurs when people are in optimum performance and tune out the rest of the world. The submissive seems to enter a different altered state of consciousness that the BDSM community refers to as <i>sub-space—</i>a pleasurable and timeless, almost floating feeling.”</p><p>Sagarin attributes the changes in a submissive’s consciousness to a temporary reduction in prefrontal-cortex activity, which is thought to be integral to the euphoric and dissociative experience of endurance runners, meditators, and individuals under hypnosis.</p><p>“One of the things that resides in the prefrontal cortex is our sense of self,” Sagarin elaborated. “When that area of the brain gets down-regulated, we can lose the distinction between ourselves and the universe.”</p><p>The feeling of expansive unity that Sagarin describes is regarded as the signature trait of a mystical experience. Fellow BDSM researcher Bert Cutler noted the prominent role of physically-induced mystical states in spiritual and healing rituals across cultures and throughout history. Cutler cited Native American body suspension, ecstatic Sufi dance, and acts of extreme skin piercing practiced by certain Hindu and Buddhist sects. “These so-called primitive societies,” he added, “have discovered a lot of things that we are only just beginning to understand.”</p><p>Back in Salinas, in the dungeon, Rogers recalled his own process of discovery. “I grew up in the Baha'i religion which was once heavily persecuted in Persia. As a kid we learned all these stories about the martyrs of our faith who were killed in horrible ways—burned or skinned alive. And, all the stories are about the ecstasy that they experienced in that process of joining God. I was always fascinated by that, even though I couldn’t comprehend it.”</p><p>Thole’s tendencies were evident even earlier. “I was definitely an exhibitionist as a young kid,” she noted. “Later, in second grade, I remember very clearly a drawing I made of this evil-looking queen going down a staircase. The stairs led to a dungeon where a naked woman was strapped to a table with a tray of torture implements beside her. I was so turned on by it.”</p><p>Fantasies like these are commonplace. As a recent <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsm.12734/abstract">study</a> reveals, over sixty percent of men and women have desires to dominate or be dominated. <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1098-2337(2000)26:3%3C225::AID-AB2%3E3.0.CO;2-R/abstract">Homicidal ideation</a> and other <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/4203167/A-survey-of-British-sexual-fantasies.html">antisocial fantasies</a> are also exceedingly normal. Given free reign, our aggressive drives have produced a human history of spectacular violence. Yet, as Rogers insists, the drives themselves are neither good nor bad. If conscientiously directed with the consent of others, even our darkest impulses can be profoundly meaningful. Unacknowledged however, they are often a constant source of shame, anxiety, and sublimation.</p><p>In Thole’s case, her tendencies attracted her to a series of abusive partners. Once she became conscious of her needs however, she was finally able to fulfill them inside the structure of a healthy relationship.</p><p>“Clients come in with desires that they don't even know how to articulate,” Rogers explained. “The repression runs so deep. What we’re really doing here is teaching adults how to play again. You know that thing you always wanted to do as a kid, but you never could? Now you can do it.”</p><p>In the words of Plato, “One can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” With a large body of supporting research, the modern psychological modality of <a href="http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.a4pt.org/resource/resmgr/About_APT/APT_Evidence_Based_Statement.pdf">play therapy</a> is based on that idea. Play therapy has traditionally focused on children, but it can be just as effective in older populations. Its promotion of spontaneity provides a unique means of bypassing sophisticated adult defense mechanisms.</p><p>“I can analyze things forever,” Rogers acknowledged. “I can make a hundred things true, or a hundred things not true. But, underneath all that logic is sensation, and that's the only way I can really track who I am. I am most myself when I don't know what I'm about to say next—when I surprise myself. When I know what I'm going to say, it's because I rehearsed it, and some part of me is probably hiding something.”</p><p>Prior to our session, Rogers and Thole had conducted a series of phone interviews with me, exploring my history and the personal issues I wanted to address. Though the pair are not clinical psychologists, their intake process is similar to those of mainstream therapists.</p><p>One notable departure was an invitation to look for sadomasochistic themes in my own life. The couple believe that all human interactions occur within the framework of a dominance hierarchy. With this in mind, I recognized a definite sadistic pleasure in passing other joggers and refusing to be passed whenever I’ve gone running. I also have a tendency to be reflexively confrontational when faced with disrespect. In other ways, I can be an abject masochist—mentally punishing myself for miscalculations or missed opportunities.</p><p>In preparation for my own encounter with Light/Dark Therapy, I wanted to see how the kink community is already using high-intensity play for healing. Naturally, I headed to the epicenter of the BDSM world, the San Francisco Armory.</p><p>Dominating an entire city block, the century-old concrete fortress is the current headquarters of Kink.com, the internet’s largest producer of BDSM-themed pornography. I was met at the gate by <span>Stefanos Tiziano, the </span>company ringmaster. When asked about the therapeutic benefits of BDSM, the military veteran spoke of a friend—a female victim of sexual assault who found closure reenacting similar scenarios with her consent. According to Tiziano, the practice is common. “At first,” he confided, “I wasn’t sure it was such a great idea, but the woman is all the better for it, and her therapist thinks so too.” In these so-called catharsis scenes, the body, once the medium of trauma, becomes the medium of healing. The feeling of agency that arises from deciding to confront a frightening situation was cited by many practitioners as the source of their catharsis.</p><p>Tiziano and I spoke in a lush Victorian-style parlor that soon filled with elegantly dressed men and women. They were here as spectators for a shoot, but many were eager to talk about the role that BDSM had played in their own lives.</p><p>Luxuriating on a velvet couch, Natalie, a physician’s assistant, spoke of using BDSM to control a once-crippling anxiety disorder. In a scenario reminiscent of exposure therapy, she would place herself in controlled scenes designed to trigger her panic attacks so that she could confront them. The petite brunette reminisced about being tied up, slapped in the face, and crammed into a small box. “Ever since I started doing that, I've been having attacks less and less frequently,” she insisted. “Now, I can allow thoughts to come in and out without getting emotionally wrapped up in them. It helped me realize that I am not my thoughts.”</p><p>Similarly, Rogers and Thole’s therapeutic objective strives to take the serious emotionally laden material of life, and turn it into low-stakes play.</p><p>As Rogers admits, his first patient was himself. “There’s a part of me that is constantly self-pitying. One day, I got so tired of it, I told my community, ‘Today, I'm going to be out with my pity, just totally honest about how I feel.’ So, for that day, everything I said was some variation of ‘poor me.’ Well, there was just so much laughter. I kept thinking, ‘How can I keep upping the pity?’ At the end of that day, I was a different person. That part of me that I was always so ashamed of turned out to be a really funny thing about me. I learned that people will still love me, and now I have that visceral experience as proof.”</p><p>Rogers described another case in which he and Thole were able to transform the psychological into the visceral. “We had an Australian client recently,” he began, “an osteopath in a dysfunctional relationship. She put me in a gimp mask and made me crawl across the floor. She transformed me into a manifestation of her sadness and frustration over her relationship. She made me into the guy that she had been having problems with. She asked, ‘Why won't you call me back?’ I said, ‘I couldn’t care less.’ In the end, she had me chained to the bed, caning every inch of my body and making me apologize for not meeting her standards. It was a catharsis that allowed her to move beyond her passivity in that relationship.”</p><p>Thole offered a further example of a computer programmer who had always felt undeserving of love. “We put him in a cage, and asked if he wanted to get out. He said ‘No, I'm comfortable.’ So, Leslie went and got a bag of ice and dumped it on him until he asked to get out. Leslie dropped the keys just out of arms reach and said, ‘Go ahead, get out of the cage.’ The client had to tell us to give him the keys in a way that wasn’t coming from self-pity. He had to believe that he deserved it. He tried several times, but he just couldn’t do it. Finally, Leslie started throwing ice at him. All of a sudden this total badass came out. He said, ‘Leslie, pick up the key and open this cage right now!’ He came out of that cage a new man. It wasn’t a new lesson though. He had been in therapy before, and had had a similar revelation about his deservingness, but it only really connected when he was able to feel it in his body.”</p><p>The power of the visceral experience in psychology has primarily been studied in a negative sense—as in conditions like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There is growing evidence however, for the reverse as well. In the growing field of psychedelic therapy for example, scientists from around the world are inducing mystical states and intense visceral experiences capable of producing lasting cures for conditions as diverse as <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/chemo-for-the-spirit-lsd-helps-cancer-patients-cope-with-death/360625/?utm_source=feed">anxiety</a>, <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ayahuasca-psychedelic-tested-for-depression/">depression</a>, and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/health/ecstasy-treatment-for-post-traumatic-stress-shows-promise.html?pagewanted=all">PTSD</a> itself.</p><p>Back in the cabin, before our first session began, I sat with Rogers and Thole to set intentions and boundaries. As always, there was to be no sexual contact. We discussed potential health issues and physical limitations. I signed a legal waiver. The couple brought up the concept of safewords. The word “red” spoken by anyone would immediately bring the proceedings to a halt.</p><p>“In the dungeon,” Rogers announced, “we become whatever the client needs to experience.” Over the next two days, the three of us became many different things. We participated in a series of scenes, comprising every imaginable combination of power dynamics. I beat the two of them. They beat me. We hurled abuse and crushed bananas at one another in turn. In between every scene, we sat as our civilized selves again and discussed what it had all meant.</p><p>Rogers has two main dominant personas. The one with the bulging eyes was The Demon—pure psychotic rage. That first night however, I was being stared down by the slit-eyed one, the one Rogers later called his Clint Eastwood.</p><p>“You’re pathetic,” he growled in an attempt to rouse my anger. “You’re broken. What’s wrong with you?”</p><p>I crossed my arms and attempted to glare back. “I can’t get mad at you, Leslie, when I know this is all an act.”</p><p>That’s when he shoved me—hard. I shoved him back, cursing. Furniture crashed to the ground as we grappled for control. Thole started screaming. It wasn’t an act anymore.</p><p>Later, when Thole led me to the St. Andrews Cross, I went willingly, but with a feeling of utter resignation. I lifted my arms so that she could strap me in as Rogers gently played the leather tendrils of the flogger over my back. Then suddenly, the first blow—expelling the breath out of me. When he struck me, I saw light. The harder he hit, the brighter the light. As the lashes fell, I felt like an obstinate child. At the same time though, I took a kind of wicked delight in the punishment of my body—as if it no longer belonged to me, as if I were free of it.</p><p>“You’ve gone far away,” Thole whispered as though she had read my mind. “You’ve left the room.”</p><p>“He’s left the planet,” Rogers announced.</p><p>With that thought, my resentment transformed instantly into a profound sorrow. I have always had an ambivalence about life—the poignant pity of being a slowly dying human body in a temporary world. I had never fully accepted it.</p><p>“What's broken in there?” Rogers demanded between strokes. “What’s wrong with you?”</p><p>“I can't be here,” I answered finally.</p><p>“Well,” he retorted, “that seems to be working very well for you. That gives you a lot of control. You're controlling us with it right now. You can appear and disappear whenever it suits you.”</p><p>“It’s not something I chose.”</p><p>They took me down from the cross and led me to the bed. Thole gestured for me to lay with my head on her lap. She stroked my hair as she smiled down upon my upturned face. “Hello,” she chirped. I laughed. “Hello,” she repeated. Whenever my attention drifted, she would say it again. In that way, she kept me present there with the two of them for a long time. “Welcome to earth,” she whispered finally, smiling like a mother.</p><p>When I left the cabin and drove back to San Francisco two days later, I was filled with a lightheartedness that lasted for days. I thought about the conversation we had that morning over breakfast. I had asked Rogers again about the Baha’i saints that had captivated him as a child. Did their ecstasy make any more sense to him now?</p><p>“It does,” he replied, “When you’re hit and you say no, that's pain. When you’re hit, and you say yes though, that’s sensation—and sensation is whatever you want it to be.”</p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedAnatol Misnikou / ShutterstockThat Time I Tried BDSM Therapy2015-10-26T11:27:52-04:002017-06-01T10:56:50-04:00<span>Not all therapists take the gentle approach.</span>tag:theatlantic.com,2015:50-402307<p>One of the first words that Koko used to describe herself was Queen. The gorilla was only a few years old when she first made the gesture—sweeping a paw diagonally across her chest as if tracing a royal sash.</p><p>“It was a sign we almost never used!” Koko’s head-caretaker Francine Patterson laughed. “Koko understands that she’s special because of all the attention she's had from professors, and caregivers, and the media.”</p><p>The cause of the primate’s celebrity is her extraordinary aptitude for language. Over the past 43 years, since Patterson began teaching Koko at the age of 1, the gorilla has learned more than 1,000 words of modified American Sign Language—a vocabulary comparable to that of a 3-year-old human child. While there have been many attempts to teach human languages to animals, none have been more successful than Patterson’s achievement with Koko.</p><p>If Koko is a queen, then her kingdom is a sprawling<a href="http://www.koko.org/"> research facility</a> in the mountains outside Santa Cruz, California. It was there, under a canopy of stately redwoods, that I met research-assistant Lisa Holliday.</p><p>“You came on a good day,” Holliday smiled. “Koko’s in a good mood. She was playing the spoon game all morning! That’s when she takes the spoon and runs off with it so you can’t give her another bite. She's an active girl. She's always got her dolls, and in the afternoon, her kittens—or as we call them, her kids.”</p><p>It was a winding stroll up a sun-spangled trail toward the cabin where Patterson was busy preparing a lunch of diced apples and nuts for Koko. The gorilla’s two kitten playmates romped in a crate by her feet. We would go deliver the meal together shortly, but first I had some questions for the 68-year-old researcher. I wanted to understand more about her famous charge and the rest of our closest living relatives.</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p><strong>Roc Morin: </strong>What do you remember from that first moment when you and Koko met?</p><p><strong>Francine Patterson: </strong>At that time, she was on exhibit at a children’s zoo. There was a giant window where we could view her. She was pretty spunky—very playful and curious, but she was also a bit insecure. She had a blanket that she carried with her whenever she went into new spaces.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How did you know that you wanted to work with her?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>She understood some English from the very beginning, because she was immersed in a language-speaking environment. She also had some signs when I arrived that she used without anybody prompting her. So, I created new signs and asked questions. That was all within the first few weeks. I noticed she was very good with it.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>So, she already understood the concept of symbolic communication?</p><p><strong>Patterson: </strong>I think she was already doing it, but when she got our signs added to hers, she generalized them—for example, the “food” sign. She would perch on this high spot where she could watch people come and go and she would sign “food” to them. It might mean “Give me the treat you’ve got,” or it might mean “I want my toothbrush,” or even just, “Engage with me.” She understood that signs had power. That particular sign got her food, so she wondered, “What else can I do with it?”</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>You mentioned that when you met her, Koko already was making signs of her own. Do gorillas use them to communicate among themselves?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>That's what's being discovered. People have looked at zoo gorillas gesturing, and they [make signs] extensively under certain situations. I think 100 different ones have been cataloged in various studies, both in free-living and zoo-dwelling gorillas. They have a pretty extensive system that may even have some cultural differences, if you look at different populations. The free-living gorillas might talk about simple things like “Where are we going to get our next meal?” but here [at the research facility] there is so much more to talk about.</p><figure><img alt="" height="652" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/08/unnamed-1/dc61afdbf.jpg" width="630"><figcaption class="credit">Ronald Cohn / The Gorilla Foundation / Koko.org</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How deep can your conversations go?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>It started early on with a conversation Koko had with one of her caregivers about death. The caregiver showed Koko a skeleton and asked, “Is this alive or dead?” Koko signed, “Dead, draped.” “Draped” means “covered up.” Then the caregiver asked, “Where do animals go when they die?” Koko said, “A comfortable hole.” Then she gave a kiss goodbye.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How would Koko know about death?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>We had gone on walks and seen dead birds and things. So, we asked her about those things. Gorillas have been observed, at least in zoos, to bury dead animals.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>I’m curious about the signs that gorillas make amongst themselves—are the signs and their meanings consistent or is it more fluid that that?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>It’s both really. Sometimes they create them on the spot. Koko has created new signs for things that we didn’t even have signs for, “barrette” for example—she simply traced a line where the barrette would be in your hair. Some of her signs were harder to figure out. I remember Koko was doing a gesture that goes across the top of her head and forward. We were telling her, “We just don't understand what you're saying. Can you say it another way?” She couldn't. She just kept doing that one sign. Then, I looked at some footage of her brother at the San Francisco zoo engaged in play with another gorilla, and I saw the gesture. Finally, I understood what it meant. He did the same exact gesture and jumped off a rock to play with the other gorilla. It means “take off” in the sense of “jump off.” Koko wanted us to take off our lab coats. She and her brother had the same gesture, even though they had never met.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>So, you’re suggesting that they have innate gestures?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>Yes, and there was another weird one both of them did, which I translated as “Walk up your back.” They put their hands palm-up behind their back and sort of bounce them a little. For Koko, that’s an invitation for a play game that involves me walking my fingers up her back.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Besides gestures, are there other forms of communication that Koko uses?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>Certainly. I realized that when she tears a page out of a magazine or a book, it’s not trash. It’s meaningful. She wants us to see it. Plus, she also uses some cards we gave her [with objects printed on them] when she has something to say. I remember one Valentine's Day, she had some cards out waiting for me that stated pretty clearly “Where are the goodies?”</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>She’s aware of symbolic events?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>Very much so—birthdays, anniversaries, holidays. Even a month before her birthday, she starts putting out some of these cards with birthday designs on them—birthday cakes and things like that. We had a celebration, I think it was Easter, and Koko was very excited for the festivities to start. She even got dressed for the occasion, fashioning a bright-yellow piece of fabric into a skirt. Her timing was perfect.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Is her concept of time similar to the human concept?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>I would say, yes, definitely. So much so, that in terms of the passing of [her kitten] All Ball—even 15 years later, whenever she encountered a picture of a kitten that looked like All Ball, she would sign, “Sad. Cry.” and point to the picture. She was still mourning after many years.</p><p><strong>Morin:</strong> I read that she met Robin Williams once and had a similar reaction when she learned about his death.</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>She actually wasn't told that he passed away. I was with her and we started getting phone calls when the news broke. She was right next to me and could hear the conversation and knew that something was wrong. She asked me to tell her what it was. So I did. It was upsetting to everybody.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>She remembered who he was?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>Oh yes. She had watched him in movies before, and his visit was not too long after [her gorilla playmate] Michael's passing. She hadn't smiled, and she had been very, very sad—not talking much, not eating much. And, when [Robin Williams] came she knew he was a funny man, and she started to come out of that. She had her first smile with him, her first laugh, and her first invitation to play a game with someone. He helped her healing.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Does a gorilla smile look the same as a human smile?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>Maybe a little more subtle. If you see a gorilla smile you can definitely identify it though.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Do you think that gorillas have a theory of mind?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>Definitely, and it's not restricted to the great apes. It's a very adaptive ability to have and probably rather widespread.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Throughout the animal kingdom?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>I would say. For example, I went to a conference in Indonesia, and we went out to look for proboscis monkeys. We were able to identify a few, but as we moved, they disappeared almost instantly. They shifted their body positions so that we couldn't see them at any given point. That's an example of projecting what we can and can’t see. Very protective of course.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How does primate cognition compare to that of humans?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>It's similar, but each species has different specialties. Orangutans plan escapes by weakening little bits of mesh over time and not saying anything, and just when it's ripe, they’re out! Bang! If you look at [Tetsuro] Matsuzawa’s work—he has shown that chimpanzees are better at<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220702088X"> short-term memory tasks</a> than we are.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>We talked about theory of mind. I want to ask about self-awareness. I understand that Koko passed the<a href="http://altweb.astate.edu/electronicjournal/Articles/sp_issue_psychobio/06%20EJIBS%20Schwartz%20gorilla_Final.pdf"> mirror self-recognition test</a>. Can you describe that process?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>She had been exposed to a mirror very early on. In the beginning, she looked behind the mirror for the other gorilla, but eventually came to use it as a tool and to groom herself and do all the activities that people do. Eventually, we did a formal test where she got marked. I did the same thing with Michael. He was used to being washed with a washcloth, but this time we secretly put pink paint on it to mark him. When he looked in the mirror, he was shocked. I realized it look like his forehead had been ripped open.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>He believed he was wounded then? How would he know what that looked like?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>Well, he was a bushmeat orphan. [Poachers] butchered his parents in front of him. He described that on camera once, actually. Early on, [researcher] Barbara Weller asked him, “Who is your mother?” He said “You.” And she said, “No, your gorilla mother.” And then, he started into this story.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What did he say?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>He was using all types of new gestures to show what he saw, like “cut” and “neck.” There was another one where it looked he was showing spots on his face, probably blood. They were nonstandard gestures.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Did he seem traumatized by that experience?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>He was really traumatized. Anytime a male worker came around, especially those doing tree work, he would just run over and scream at them. [The incident with his parents] may have involved traps and trees. We don't know what happened. He also would scream in the middle of the night in his nightmares.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Did he ever communicate the substance of those nightmares?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>Yes, the night after he screamed I asked him [about that] and got a very similar story.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>I’m working on a project collecting<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/05/dreams-world-atlas/393182/?utm_source=feed"> dreams from around the world</a>, but I’ve just been focusing on human dreams so far. Maybe I’m limiting myself. Has Koko shared any with you?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>This is really weird, but you know that movie Jurassic Park? They saturated the media with ads that were very graphic with dinosaurs eating humans and all kinds of things. Well, Koko saw them, and several days later one of our caregivers reported her acting very strangely towards her toy dinosaurs and alligators. She was acting as though they were real, and was very frightened of them, and didn't want to touch them. She was using tools to get them away from her. I do believe she had a nightmare about them.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Does she move around in her sleep or make vocalizations that lead you to believe that she's dreaming?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>We have a video on her all the time and we catch sign-like gestures, but I don’t remember any of them right now.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>You mentioned before in the case of Barbara Weller that Michael saw her as a kind of mother. Do you feel that way with Koko?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>Oh yeah, the maternal instinct is raging with a baby gorilla! I would much prefer to have a baby gorilla than a baby human.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Koko herself has expressed her desire to be a mother, hasn’t she?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>Very much so. She takes on that role with her kittens. She tries to hold them up to nurse, but of course she doesn't understand the mechanics of that. We've tried to set up a family situation where that would work, but one-on-one is not a social unit for gorillas.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>They need to be in a troop to mate?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>It takes a village.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What kinds of research are you currently working on with Koko?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>Basically, to expand and pay attention to the many ways she communicates with us in more sophisticated, subtle ways. We’re also learning to pay attention to her use of things in her environment. Not just things with words, but positioning objects over time. I forgot to mention that in terms of time. I noticed once that Koko somehow had put a cover over a small table [in her room] and the underneath part was private. The first thing that appeared under there was a Koko doll that we had made for her—a plush gorilla. The next day I came in, there was a larger gorilla doll next to it. The next day, there was a baby in between them. So, she told a story.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What other stories has she told?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>Koko is more of a verbal manipulator and an object manipulator. Michael was the big storyteller. As soon as he had the words “cat” “eat” “bird” and “bad,” he was saying that cats eat birds and they’re bad.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>He had a moral judgment about killing?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>Right. Look what happened to him and his family, and cats are doing the same things—killing others and eating them.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Are there moral lessons we can learn from non-human primates?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>There are all kinds of lessons in there about heroism and empathy. [The gorilla] Binti Jua saved a boy who fell into her enclosure. They were shooting a hose at her to keep her away from that boy, and she rescued him in the face of that punishment and took him to her caregivers. Washoe [a chimpanzee] did the same thing. She pulled a chimpanzee out of a moat when she had never ventured [into the water before] and had no idea what she was getting into.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Getting back to Koko and Michael, why do you think they’re such good communicators? Are they special or could any gorilla be taught to communicate similarly?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>I think the rich environment played a large part. There was a study of <a href="https://www.asp.org/meetings/abstractDisplay.cfm?abstractID=2753&amp;confEventID=2648">Michael’s brain</a>, and there are certain structures of his brain that are more like humans than any other animal they've looked at.</p><p><strong>Morin:</strong> If the gorillas are becoming more human-like, are you becoming more gorilla-like?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>Yeah, I think we’e become a little bit more like gorillas. Maybe we’re more blunt, and also just quiet. They just look like little Buddhas!</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Do you have a sense of what that mentality is like experientially for them?</p><p><strong>​Patterson: </strong>Uncontaminated by humans, they are definitely closer to living in the now. Our problem is that we live in the past and we live in the future, but we very rarely dwell in the now. They are so much in harmony with nature, we surely could use them as a model.</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p>My first glimpse of Koko was through the chain-link fence marking the boundary of her play room. Holliday directed me to a plastic chair. “If she likes you,” the assistant offered, “she’ll gesture for you to come closer onto the porch with her.” I said hello through the surgical mask that an assistant had given me along with a pair of latex gloves. With a<a href="http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics"> 98 percent genetic similarity</a>, gorillas and humans are susceptible to most of the same pathogens. I tried to smile with my eyes as I made the sign of greeting—a little salute.</p><p>Patterson cautioned me earlier to refrain from asking Koko questions. I was to let the gorilla take the lead. “She has that royal air about her,” the researcher explained, “and she doesn't entertain questions. Just like you wouldn’t question the queen—Koko is the same way. She’ll disengage.”</p><p>After a moment, the 350-pound primate gestured for me to approach. I thanked her as I climbed onto the porch, touching one of the big black fingers that she offered through the fence. She purred. “That means she’s happy,” Patterson noted.</p><p>For nearly a minute, Koko and I gazed into one another’s eyes. Hers were dark and serene.</p><p>With Patterson acting as translator, Koko directed me to remove my mask. The gorilla demonstrated that she wanted me to blow out, so she could smell my breath. Olfaction is important to gorillas, Patterson explained. The gorilla was sussing me out. Next, Koko asked me to pick some flowers from a nearby garden and bring them over. I gave her a red blossom first, which she promptly ate. The second one I offered, she took, and then handed back to me. Patterson said that Koko wanted me to eat it too. I told Koko that I liked the smell and asked if she did too. She sniffed at it once, before turning her head, apparently unimpressed.</p><p>After a while, Patterson brought in the kittens. Koko gently picked up the grey one, and cradled it in her arms. I asked if the kitten was her baby. She purred, and offered it to me, to pet through the fence.</p><p>The gorilla turned to Patterson and requested that I enter her enclosure. “That’s a very nice compliment,” the researcher told me. “It means she really likes you. Unfortunately, we can’t let you in.”</p><p>She turned back to the gorilla who already seemed to understand Patterson’s dismissal. Any human parent would immediately recognize her tight-lipped, arms-crossed, hunched-over pouting posture.</p><p>“Aw, I’m sorry darling,” Patterson apologized. Koko pointed to the lock on the door and gestured again, even more emphatically that it should be opened. When Patterson again refused, Koko turned her back on us, seemingly in protest.</p><p>Ultimately, it was hard to avoid constructing a narrative around what I was seeing. It was hard to look at Koko and not experience some aspect of myself staring back at me. There was no way to know how much of her behavior was intentional and how much was my own or Patterson’s projection. Allegations of selective interpretation have accompanied ape-language research from the beginning. Still, it was impossible to be there interacting with her, and not feel that I was in the presence of another self-conscious being.</p><p>As the clock ran down on our visit, Patterson informed Koko that I was leaving. The gorilla gestured goodbye, and watched me go—and there it was again, that profoundly penetrating gaze that reciprocated my own. I didn’t want to go. It was a gaze that drew me in closer and closer, even as I moved farther and farther away. I thought of all the radio and optical telescopes of the world perpetually aimed at the sky—scanning the heavens for the faintest glimmer of intelligent life. All this, while we are still so far from truly understanding the intelligent life here at home.</p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedAlysia AlexanderThe author and KokoA Conversation With Koko the Gorilla2015-08-28T08:00:00-04:002015-08-28T09:54:12-04:00An afternoon spent with the famous gorilla who knows sign language, and the scientist who taught her how to &ldquo;talk&rdquo;tag:theatlantic.com,2015:50-398363<p dir="ltr"><span><span>In Chinese, the word </span><em><span>computer</span></em><span> translates directly as </span><em><span>electric brain</span></em><span>.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>In Icelandic, a </span><em><span>compass</span></em><span><em> </em>is a </span><em><span>direction-shower</span></em><span>, and a </span><em><span>microscope</span></em><span> a </span><em><span>small-watcher</span></em><span>.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>In Lakota, </span><em><span>horse</span></em><span> is literally </span><em><span>dog of wonder</span></em><span>.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>These neologisms demonstrate the cumulative quality of language, in which we use the known to describe the unknown.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>“</span><span>It is by metaphor that language grows,” writes the psychologist Julian Jaynes. “The common reply to the question ‘What is it?’ is, when the reply is difficult or the experience unique, ‘Well, it is like —.’”</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>That metaphorical process is at the heart of</span><a href="http://tokipona.org/"><span> </span><span>Toki Pona</span></a><span>, the world’s smallest language. While the Oxford English Dictionary contains </span><span>a quarter of a million entries, and even Koko the gorilla communicates with over 1,000 gestures in American Sign Language, the total vocabulary of Toki Pona is a mere 123 words. Yet, as the creator Sonja Lang and many other Toki Pona speakers insist, it is enough to express almost any idea. This economy of form is accomplished by reducing symbolic thought to its most basic elements, merging related concepts, and having single words perform multiple functions of speech.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>In contrast to the hundreds or thousands of study hours required to attain fluency in other languages, a general consensus among Toki Pona speakers is that it takes about 30 hours to master. That ease of acquisition, many of them believe, makes it an ideal international auxiliary language—the realization of an ancient dream to return humanity to a pre-Babel unity. Toki Pona serves that function already for hundreds of enthusiasts connected via online communities in countries as diverse as Japan, Belgium, New Zealand, and Argentina.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>In addition to making Toki Pona simple to learn, the language’s minimalist approach is also designed to change how its speakers think. </span><span>The paucity of terms provokes a kind of creative circumlocution that requires careful attention to detail. An avoidance of set phrases keeps the process fluid. The result, according to Lang, is to immerse the speaker in the moment, in a state reminiscent of what Zen Buddhists call mindfulness.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>“What is a car?” Lang mused recently via phone from her home in Toronto.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>“Y</span><span>ou might say that a car is a space that's used for movement,” she proposed. “That would be </span><em><span>tomo tawa</span></em><span>. If you’re struck by a car though, it might be </span><span>a hard object that’s hitting me</span><span>. That’s </span><em><span>kiwen utala</span></em><span>.”</span></span></p><!-- START "MORE ON" SINGLE STORY BOX v. 2 --><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><!-- END "MORE ON" SINGLE STORY BOX v. 2 --><p dir="ltr"><span><span>The real question is: What is a car </span><span>to you</span><span>?</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>As with most things in Toki Pona, the answer is relative.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>“We wear many hats in life,” Lang continued, “One moment I might be a sister, the next moment a worker, or a writer. Things change and we have to adapt.”</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>The language’s dependence on subjectivity and context is also an exercise in perspective-taking.</span><span> “</span><span>You have to consider your interlocutor’s way of understanding the world, or situation,” the Polish citizen Marta </span><span>Krzeminska stated. “For that reason, </span><span>I think it has great potential for bringing people together.”</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>To create her new language, Lang worked backwards—against the trend of a natural lexicon. She began by reducing and consolidating the specific into the general.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>“I think colors are a good example,” she offered. “You have millions of shades that are slightly different from one another, and at some point someone says, ‘Well, from here to here is blue, and from here to here is green.’ There are these arbitrary lines that people agree on.”</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>Toki Pona has a five-color palette: </span><em><span>loje</span></em><span> (red), </span><em><span>laso</span></em><span> (blue), </span><em><span>jelo</span></em><span> (yellow),<em> </em></span><em><span>pimeja</span></em><span><em> </em>(black), and </span><em><span>walo</span></em><span><em> </em>(white). Like a painter, the speaker can combine them to achieve any hue on the spectrum. </span><em><span>Loje walo</span></em><span> for </span><span>pink</span><span>. </span><em><span>Laso jelo</span></em><span> for </span><span>green</span><span>.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>Numbers are also minimal. Lang initially only had words for </span><span>one (<em>wan</em>)</span><span>, </span><span>two (<em>tu</em>)</span><span>, and </span><span>several (<em>mute</em>)</span><span>. Many Toki Pona speakers have expanded the word </span><em><span>luka</span></em><span><em> </em>(</span><em><span>hand</span></em><span> or </span><em><span>arm</span></em><span>) to mean </span><em><span>five</span></em><span>, and </span><em><span>mute</span></em><span> to mean </span><em><span>10</span></em><span>. The terms are repeated additively until the desired number is reached.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>“There are some mathematician-like people who insist that they want to be able to say 7,422.7,” Lang laughed. “I say, ‘That's not exactly the point.’”</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>The point is simplicity. And in Toki Pona, </span><em><span>simple</span></em><span> is literally </span><em><span>good</span></em><span>. Both concepts are combined in a single word: </span><em><span>pona</span></em><span>.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>“If you can express yourself in a simple way,” Lang explained, “then you really understand what you're talking about, and that's good. If something is too complicated, that's bad. You’re putting too much noise into the equation. That belief is kind of hardwired into the language.”</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>The polyglot Christopher Huff agreed, noting that Toki Pona had made him more honest. “I’m more comfortable now with the things I don’t know.”</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>“I didn’t realize how complex other languages are until I started speaking Toki Pona,” Krzeminska added. “There are so many different things you have to say before you actually get to say what you want, and there are so many things you're not allowed to say even though you mean them. Take politeness markers for instance: </span><em><span>If it’s not too much of an inconvenience, would you please consider possibly bringing me a cup of coffee?</span></em><span> In Toki Pona you would just say: </span><em><span>Give me coffee.</span></em><span><em> </em>Either do it or don’t do it. There’s no word for </span><em><span>please</span></em><span> or </span><em><span>thank you</span></em><span>. I mean, maybe if you really wanted, you could say </span><em><span>pona</span></em><span>, but then why would you overuse a word that’s so big and powerful?”</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>Ultimately though, as many Toki Pona users discover, powerful cultural conventions are not so easily discarded. Speakers are often quick to find clever substitutes, especially in the realm of the non-verbal. "I definitely find myself relying more on body language," Krzeminska admitted. "We're so used to saying please and thank you that we tend to do a little Japanese-style nod now instead. It's so weird not to say anything at all."</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>Despite compromises in etiquette, Toki Pona still manages to convey a culture of its own. Through omission and inclusion, the vocabulary itself is rooted in the basic material of life. “I was inspired by hunter-gatherers,” Lang noted. “I thought, what would it have been like to just be a person in nature, interacting with things in a primitive way?</span><span>”</span></span></p><!-- START "MORE ON" SINGLE STORY BOX v. 2 --><!-- END "MORE ON" SINGLE STORY BOX v. 2 --><p dir="ltr"><span><span>Accordingly, there are several words denoting different living organisms, and none for specific modern technologies. All technology is essentially subsumed by the general term for </span><span>tool</span><span> (</span><em><span>ilo</span></em><span>) and augmented, if desired, by other words describing distinct functions. Addressing this choice, Huff spoke of a divide in the Toki Pona community. “There is one spirit that says Toki Pona is</span><span> able</span><span> to talk about these things, so we </span><span>should</span><span> talk about these things. There is another spirit that says maybe there are things we just don’t need to talk about.”</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>Along with the previously noted biases, the lexicon also exhibits an acknowledged propensity for positivity. Krzeminska, who speaks the language with her best friend, noted that they tend to slip into Toki Pona for pleasant conversations. “That's one of Sonja's principles. It's a language for cute and nice things. It’s also great for talking about feelings. There are limited concepts, so one word can mean everything. The word </span><span>pona</span><span> is everything that's good in the world: pineapples, bananas, cute kittens</span><span>. If I call my friend a </span><em>jan pona</em><span>, I’m calling him a </span><span>good person</span><span>. Often, if we’re both tired and everything is too much, we just say, everything will be</span><span> <em>pona</em></span><span>. You’re a beautiful person, and everything is beautiful, and everything will be beautiful. And then, everything is better.”</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>For a different perspective, I spoke with John Quijada, the creator of</span><a href="http://www.ithkuil.net/"><span> </span><span>Ithkuil</span></a><span>. The former DMV employee spent three decades perfecting what he calls, “</span><span>an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression.” By combining 58 phonemes within an exacting grammatical framework, Ithkuil is designed to precisely express all possible human thoughts. It is so complex that even its creator often requires 10 minutes or more to assemble a single word.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><em><span>Aistlaţervièllîmļ</span></em><span>, for example, is the term for “a situation where one lets a normally unavailable opportunity pass by because it is not seen as being the optimal instance or form of that opportunity, despite the likelihood that such an optimal instance/form of the opportunity will likely never come (e.g., letting a bottle of expensive wine go past its prime because one can never decide when would be the optimal time to drink it; or letting slip by an opportunity for true love because one hopes someone even ‘better’ may come along.)”</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>One student of the language claimed that it allowed her to “see things that exist but don’t have names, in the same way that Mendeleyev’s periodic table showed gaps where we knew elements should be that had yet to be discovered.” Tweak a single phoneme and arrive at a strange new variation of a thought. Tweak by tweak, a speaker could wander forever through an endless landscape of unique thoughts in a kind of linguistic dérive.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>I was curious about what a man who had dedicated his life to accuracy thought about a language in which a word for </span><span>floor</span><span> (</span><em><span>anpa</span></em><span>) also means </span><em><span>defeat</span></em><span>, and the noun for </span><span>head</span><span> (</span><em><span>lawa</span></em><span>) is also the verb for </span><em><span>control</span></em><span>.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>“I've always been so fascinated by ambiguity,” Quijada admitted. “I have a great deal of respect for it. That’s one of the reasons why I tried to defeat it—to see if it could be defeated.”</span></span></p><p dir="ltr"><span><span>As for the disparity between Toki Pona and Ithkuil, the music-lover was predictably succinct. “It’s the difference between John Cage’s <em>4’33”</em> and a Beethoven symphony.”</span></span></p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedJan Nikita / WikimediaHow to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language2015-07-15T08:03:00-04:002015-07-15T11:27:55-04:00<span><span>Those who speak </span><span>Toki Pona say </span><span>linguistic simplicity can enable a more profound form of communication.</span></span>tag:theatlantic.com,2015:50-393182<p>The first thing I learned is: Everybody flies.</p><p>Consider the surly taxi driver I met in Ukraine who, when asked what he dreamed of at night, responded, “I jump and then I fly—higher than the trees, higher than the trolley wires.”</p><p>“I think when I die,” he mused, “that’s what it’s going to be like.”</p><p>As an instructor in psychology at the City College of New York, I teach about the power of the subconscious, whose hidden cognition comprises <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/54/7/462/">the vast majority</a> of brain activity. Increasingly, research is confirming that we humans are <a href="http://authors.library.caltech.edu/40355/">almost entirely subconscious</a> beings, largely oblivious to the mind’s extensive inner workings. Dreams are one of the few exceptions.</p><p>I’ve always had an active dream life (just recently, I sent a herd of buffalo rampaging through a deserted Times Square, and performed psychic surgery on a thousand-chambered heart). Curious whether others had similar experiences, I started the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/worlddreamatlas">World Dream Atlas</a> project, a Facebook page of dreams gathered on my off hours while traveling as a journalist. Over the last 10 months, I’ve collected dreams from hundreds of people in 17 countries.</p><p>In class, I teach from a scientific perspective—everything from Freud’s interpretation of dreams as encrypted “<a href="http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Freud/Dreams/dreams.pdf">emotional and intellectual trains of thought</a>” to Jie Zhang’s theory of dreams as a <a href="http://www.journaloftheoretics.com/articles/6-6/zhang.pdf">byproduct of memory-encoding</a>. Each paradigm is different, but most ignore the innate power of dreams. Dreams are typically regarded as part of a subordinate reality that only becomes significant if it can be translated into something rational. But when dreams are experienced on their own terms, they offer a glimpse of how expansive our minds can be outside the strictures of physical reality. They remind us that some of our most meaningful and transformative experiences are, by nature, irrational. Since most academic research on dreams is generated in the West, I ventured overseas for a fuller understanding of that potential.</p><p>I have found that, across cultures, dreams often entail a return to mysticism or the divine, and allow people to engage in magical thinking without stigma. But I’ve noticed population-specific trends as well. Violent nightmares are common in the gang-ridden border towns of Mexico and the war zone of eastern Ukraine. Scenes of nuclear war still haunt the “duck-and-cover” generation in both the East and the West. Blessings by gods and goddesses are frequently reported in heavily religious India, whereas in more secular Western populations, those same functions are often performed by celebrities. I’m not the first to document the link between culture and dream content. In <a href="http://jcc.sagepub.com/content/29/2/320.short">one study</a>, the dreams of Palestinian children in violent areas were found to feature more aggression and persecution than those of Palestinian children living in peaceful areas; in <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/j.2161-1912.1994.tb00253.x/abstract">another</a>, African American women were shown to have more dreams in which they are victims of circumstance or fate than Mexican American or Anglo American women.</p><p>I’ve received my share of rude rebuffs, as well as a few heartbroken looks from people who mistook me for <a href="http://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork">Humans of New York</a>. Still, the most common reaction to my elevator pitch is a smile. People are more open than I ever imagined; it amazes me that I can walk up to someone I’ve never met before and, in a matter of minutes, be talking to them about some of their deepest and most personal reflections, or laughing like old friends.</p><p><em>“I’ve always wanted to go to America. Recently, I dreamed that I went there with my two sisters. We were having so much fun, but then we started fighting each other with pistols. There were many, many guns there, and a lot of blood. America is a very beautiful country, but too many bomb blasts.” – Devpur, India</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_1_Roc_Morin/fd6bc0513.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><p><em>“I gave birth to a baby, and it was a sandwich! I put it in my backpack. Then suddenly I was like, ‘Oh! I forgot about my baby! I am a horrible mother!’” – Los Angeles, USA</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_2_Roc_Morin/723528d3a.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><p><em>“When I was 16, I dreamed that I won the lottery. Of course, the first thing I did was buy my high school. When my actual alarm clock went off, I kinda half woke up. I thought, ‘I don’t have to go to school, I own the place!’ Then, I rolled over and went back to sleep.” – Vancouver, Canada</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_3_Roc_Morin/3fcfde66a.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><hr><p>Even when someone says no to me, the exchange can be enlightening.</p><p>“My dreams?” a woman in Latvia asked. “That’s something very private, isn’t it?<span>”</span></p><p>“It’s OK,” I assured her. “I’m a professional, you see. So it’s rather like undressing for a doctor’s exam. Strictly business.”</p><p>“Actually,” she countered, “I’m a stripper, so I have no problem taking off my clothes. But my dreams? That’s very different.”</p><hr><p>The first person I ever approached for the project was a cashier in Iceland named Heiða, who happened to be a <em>berdreymin</em>,<em> </em>a term Icelanders use to describe someone who sees the future in dreams. It was a gift, she explained, passed down through generations on her father’s side. Several people I’ve met have relayed experiences of perceived clairvoyance in dreams.</p><p><em>“My nightmares began in November [of 2013]. Nobody was thinking about war then. In my dreams though, I saw it. I was hiding from gunfire with my husband in the ruins of our home. I never believed in dreams before this.” – Semenivka, Ukraine</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_4_Roc_Morin/a4441870d.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><p><em>“My sister has always been ill. She has a genetic disease that kept her in the hospital for much of her life. My mom and my dad were told that if they had another baby, the baby would have a 90 percent chance of getting this disease. When my mom recognized that she was pregnant with me, they were scared that I would get this disease, and they were thinking maybe not to have me. Then my mom had a dream that a priest came up to her. The priest said, ‘You will have a completely healthy girl.’ When my mom woke up, she told my dad, ‘We will have this baby. She will be fine.’ And I am fine. I’m perfectly healthy.” - Berlin, Germany</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_5_Roc_Morin-1/b24d3c919.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><p><em>“I often have dreams that come true. I can look at someone’s eyes and if there is a dark shadow in the eyes, I know that they will die within 24 hours. With earthquakes too, I can feel when they will come within 24 hours. I don’t understand it, but my sisters have the same sense too. I was told that my clan, which is the Raven-Koho clan, has this sense. When somebody dies, it’s up to the Raven-Kohos to comfort the families.” - Juneau, USA</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_6_Roc_Morin-2/c4e11810c.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><hr><p>Magical thinking is a common element in dreams throughout the world, and perhaps nowhere more so than in Iceland. In a nation where <a href="https://notendur.hi.is/~erlendur/english/Psychic-experiences/Psychic-Exp-2011.pdf">54 percent</a> <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/why-so-many-icelanders-still-believe-in-invisible-elves/280783/?utm_source=feed">of the population</a> believes in elves, the line dividing reality and unreality can be elusive, as this dream from a man named Hermundur shows.</p><p><em>“I was staying in a room with no windows. It was pitch black inside. The darkness was so heavy, I could not breathe—like being in a coffin. Suddenly, I saw this small light [come] out of the door and [start] to float around. It came very close to me. Inside of this light was a tiny, tiny person. I was watching this light until I fell asleep.” – Reykjavik, Iceland</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_5_Roc_Morin/7c29c7b3f.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><hr><p>Hermundur speculated that the fairy he saw came to comfort him in his loneliness. Dream visitations by benevolent mystical beings seem to be archetypal, with personal belief and culture often determining what form the figures take.</p><p><em>“I see the Lord in my dreams. He comes as a bright light. A big angel covers me and my kids and 14 grandkids with his wings.” – Tijuana, Mexico</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_6_Roc_Morin/bcb33474d.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><p><em>“I dreamed that I went to Switzerland and visited the graves of Charlie Chaplin and his wife, Oona. Charlie and Oona rose out of their graves. ‘Ashok,’ they said, ‘You’re doing good in this world.’ Then they embraced me, and I wept.” – Adipur, India</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_9_Roc_Morin/d7d4132c3.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><p><em>“I’m in love with the main singer from Camera Obscura: Tracyanne. She’s in a lot of my dreams. She doesn’t do much. She just kind of exists in my periphery, and grants me her approval.” – New York, USA</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_8_Roc_Morin/5ac4fcb00.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><hr><p>Such phantom visitations are perhaps most beneficial for those coping with the death of a loved one. I’m repeatedly told about visions of the dead and the positive effect they have on the grieving process. The encounters are often brief, and the apparitions impervious to touch or inaccessible in other ways. Still, the deceased usually appear content and vivacious. Most dreamers report a feeling of closure.</p><p><em>“A month after my wife died, she came to me in a dream. She was only there for two minutes. She looked very good, very healthy. She embraced me, and asked if I would take care of our two grandchildren. I promised that I would.” – Devpur, India</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_11_Roc_Morin/b999cebae.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><p><em>“In my last dream, I met my father who passed away some time ago. We used to fish together when I was a kid, and in the dream I wanted to ask him when we could go on one last fishing trip. I didn’t get to ask because the dream ended too fast. I had always wanted to go fishing with him one last time as an adult, but we never had the chance. Even though we didn’t go fishing in the dream, it was still very good to see him.” – Warsaw, Poland</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_12_Roc_Morin/93aa28a09.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><p><em>“My mom passed away seven years ago. I had just heard about a study that ranked the happiest and most depressing cities in the U.S. The most depressing place to live was Detroit, and the happiest was Boulder, Colorado. Anyway, a few nights later, I had a dream that I was Skyping with my mom. I was crying because I hadn’t seen her in forever. I said, ‘Where have you been? I’ve missed you! I’ve been worried sick!’ And she looked at me, and she goes, ‘I’m in Boulder, Colorado.’” – New York, USA</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_13_Roc_Morin/69a832bc1.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><hr><p>Of course, death can also haunt sleep, as it often does for veterans, trauma victims, and the elderly.</p><p><em>“I am 103 years old, so I don’t sleep well. But when I do, I see the dead—dead bodies, known and unknown.” – Rajuri, India</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_14_Roc_Morin/6b4751508.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><p><em>“When I killed my first person, I couldn’t sleep for three days. He wasn’t very close. He was 40 meters away from me, but I saw how he died. In my dreams, I always see the fighting. My wife Oksana is a sniper. She also sees such dreams. Oksana wraps her arms around herself and curls up. She pushes into me, trying to get as close as she can. We both dream of our friends who were killed. In our dreams, they are still fighting alongside of us.” – Horlivka, Ukraine/Donetsk People’s Republic</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_15_Roc_Morin/babf00442.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><p><em>“I’m a Vietnam veteran, and all we did was what you call ‘hit and run.’ I was a river raider down in the delta. Many times I went to sleep in that muddy water. I didn’t think I was coming back. After I came home, I used to just wake up at night thinking I was about to shoot somebody. I did a lot of killing. Kill and stack the bodies. That’s all we did.” – New Orleans, USA</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_16_Roc_Morin/14f1b4427.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><hr><p>Among the dreams I’ve encountered, some of the most fascinating have been those involving mystical states of consciousness, or a lucid manipulation of the dream space by the dreamer. They suggest an existential freedom far beyond that enjoyed in waking life.</p><p><em>“I entered a room of people watching a wall of TV monitors. They talked to me and answered my questions. I was so surprised that they had real personalities—they were independent of me. They explained that they travel in dreams. ‘You went too deep,’ they warned. ‘You shouldn’t be here very long.’” - Kiev, Ukraine</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_17A_Roc_Morin/28d418a4c.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><p><em>“I often dream that the Goddess Amba Ma is watching me. In the temple, in the home, she stands there silently. I know it’s her because she has many arms and her face looks just like her pictures. The first time she came, I was afraid. Now, when I see her I’m happy. Sometimes, I begin to shake and I can feel her enter my body.” – Ahmedabad, India</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_18_Roc_Morin/0359f278b.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><p><em>“Sometimes when I’m falling asleep, I have this strange feeling of being huge and tiny at the same time. I can best explain it as a grain of sand up against a gigantic boulder—and being both at once. You feel the smallness and the bigness at the same time; the smallness feels greater when it is up against the vastness of its opposing size, and the boulder’s bigness feels even more massive compared to the tininess of the grain of sand.” – Berlin, Germany</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_20_Roc_Morin/b7eb593fc.jpg" width="550"></figure></div><hr><p>I have always found the surreal aesthetics of dreams appealing, but it took 10 months of collecting them to understand why. I used to think of their inherent mystery—of all mystery really—as a simple lack of information. Mystery was a vacuum to be filled by knowledge. I see things differently now. I believe that mystery is an active and substantial force in its own right.</p><p><em>“There’s just one dream that I remember from many, many years ago. I’d lose the magic if I told you, so I can’t. I can show you this tattoo though. The tattoo is part of it.” – Austin, USA</em></p><div style="text-align:center">
<figure style="display: inline-block;"><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/05/WDA_21_Roc_Morin/4df829c32.jpg" width="550"></figure></div>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedRoc Morin"To be an artist is to live inside a lucid dream." - New York, USAWhat People Around the World Dream About2015-05-14T08:43:22-04:002015-05-14T14:27:43-04:00<span>An atlas of the subconscious, from Tijuana to </span><span>Reykjavik</span><br />
<!--EndFragment-->tag:theatlantic.com,2014:50-382096<p>“The first time that I heard this voice, I was very much frightened,” the prisoner testified. “When I heard it for the third time, I recognized that it was the voice of an angel … The voice said to me: ‘Go into France!’ I could bear it no longer.”</p><p>Joan of Arc, who spoke these words before her execution in 1431, is just one of many notable voice-hearers cited in the literature of <a href="http://www.intervoiceonline.org/">Intervoice</a>, an advocacy organization for individuals living with auditory hallucinations. Other examples include Sigmund Freud, Winston Churchill, Socrates, William Blake, and Mahatma Gandhi. According to Intervoice founder Dr. Marius Romme, the lives of these extraordinary figures demonstrate the frequently benign nature of recurring hallucinations.</p><p>In many cases, Romme’s research has suggested, the phenomenon can even prove beneficial. “The problem,” he writes, “is not hearing voices, but the inability to cope with the experience.” In 1987, after two decades of clinical work, the Dutch psychiatrist began promoting a drug-free therapy in which patients were encouraged to accept and analyze their voices.</p><p>At that time, Romme’s method was the antithesis of mainstream psychiatry. A 1973 <em>Science </em>article, “<a href="http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2384&amp;context=lawreview&amp;sei-redir=1&amp;referer=http%3A%2F%2Fscholar.google.com%2Fscholar_url%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fdigitalcommons.law.scu.edu%2Fcgi%2Fviewcontent.cgi%253Farticle%253D2384%2526context%253Dlawreview%26sa%3DX%26scisig%3DAAGBfm3m0jpDnF2bnKYhfcxDwjFB0_l03Q%26oi%3Dscholarr#search=%22http%3A%2F%2Fdigitalcommons.law.scu.edu%2Fcgi%2Fviewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D2384%26context%3Dlawreview%22">On Being Sane in Insane Places</a>,” describes an experiment that exposed prevailing attitudes towards hearing voices. In the experiment, eight “pseudo-patients” made appointments at 12 different U.S. hospitals. The pseudo-patients complained of hearing voices that repeated the words “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.” All were diagnosed with schizophrenia and given anti-psychotic medication. The pseudo-patients were held for between seven and 52 days, even though they had immediately ceased their simulated symptoms upon admittance.</p><p>Today, with decades of additional research and drug development to draw from, Western medicine still offers little else to those experiencing auditory hallucinations. Research even suggests that common treatments might be exacerbating the condition. In regards to schizophrenia, the <a href="http://www.who.int/mental_health/media/en/55.pdf">World Health Organization</a> states that “a substantial body of evidence shows a more benign course and better outcome in developing countries [than in developed countries].” As a recent <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/july/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614.html">Stanford study</a> indicates, voices in nations like India and Ghana, are significantly more likely to be friendly than voices in the United States.</p><p>After examining how schizophrenia-related symptoms are viewed in different cultures, Ethan Watters concludes in his book <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Crazy-Like-Us-Globalization-American/dp/1416587098/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1414504937&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=crazy+like+us">Crazy Like Us</a></em> that the stigma of diagnosis and its isolating effects are to blame for the disparity. Developing countries tend to have explanations for the condition, such as spirit possession, that exculpate individuals and preserve their existing identities. The beliefs also sustain family and community relationships with the afflicted. These modalities are at the heart of Romme’s methods.</p><p>I traveled to the medieval city of Tilburg in the Netherlands to experience what Romme calls the “hearing-voices approach.” Romme’s protégé of 32 years, Dr. Dirk Corstens, was giving a workshop on the practice to seven voice-hearers. I sat down with Corstens and patients Michel and Angie (who declined to provide their surnames), to learn more about living with voices.</p><hr><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What happened here today?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: We tried to motivate people to talk a little more about their voices. Most of them never talk about them. Often, the voices forbid you to talk about them. Professionals also often don’t know how to approach the subject. The first day is a difficult day. You have to build trust.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What did they talk about?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: They told their stories about how they cope with voices, and we started to demonstrate what we call the “construct.” In the construct, you find the relationship between what happens in people’s lives and their voices. We try to make sense of the voices.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Can you give an example of that?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: Today, we worked with a 43-year-old woman named Marie. She hears eight voices. The voices don’t have names, but she can differentiate them. They talk to her and to each other throughout the day. First, we explored how many voices there are, how old they are, their gender, and whether they have a name or not.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How do you use that information?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: We analyze every voice and try to explore what the characteristics are. So, these three voices—numbers 1, 6, and 8—are very aggressive and negative. They shout at Marie, “You are nothing! You have to die! Swallow pills! You have to mutilate yourself!” And they are there all day and every day, especially at night when she tries to sleep. There’s this child of three who is always crying. There’s this 18-year-old boy who criticizes her. And then, not very often, there’s this man who tries to protect Marie from the 18-year-old boy. There’s also this eight-year-old female voice—she’s playful and always tries to cheer Marie up, but the voice becomes angry if Marie doesn’t cheer up—which she rarely does. The group of voices, which she calls “the trustees,” shouts words to interrupt her conversations.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What do the traits of the voices indicate?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: They help us understand what problems these voices represent. A lot of it has to do with Marie being rejected, having no self-confidence, and not being able to make decisions herself. We try to find out when these voices started. In her case, they started when she was 27 and had final exams at university. But, it was all related to the divorce of her parents when she was six, and witnessing violence at home—being bullied, etcetera. All these things come back in the voices.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>You mean that she internalized some of the people in her life?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: Well, they don’t have names, but we try to find out who these voices represent. The stepfather resembles one of the booing guys, another is a sister, another is an imaginary friend.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>So, it’s a form of relationship therapy as well?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: Yes.</p><p><strong>Michel</strong>: It really is. [Dr. Corstens and I] started to work with each other five years ago, or more. I was around 20 years old. It took about two years of work to actually figure out what the relationships were, what the triggers for the voices were, and what feelings are coupled to these voices. Once you start to learn to express yourself and work out these problems on your own, the voices don’t have to act out their part. Now, when I hear voices, I know what triggered them. I ask, “What is happening with me? What am I neglecting in my own emotions?” Does that make sense?</p><p><strong>Morin:</strong> Because you recognize the voices are a part of yourself?</p><p><strong>Michel</strong>: Yes. I used to experience them as different entities—not part of me. Now, I actually believe they are just a part of me I have to deal with.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Can you describe these voices?</p><!-- START "MORE ON" SINGLE STORY BOX v. 2 --><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><!-- END "MORE ON" SINGLE STORY BOX v. 2 --><p><strong>Michel</strong>: The earliest voice started out as a drill sergeant—very strict, very dominant. I was about six years old. Later on, he developed into a really aggressive shouting voice when I started abusing drugs and alcohol. It got to a point where I couldn’t function well. He was constantly shouting, “You have to hurt yourself! You have to hurt other people!”</p><p>Then there is a second voice that came later on. He is actually not bad—actually quite positive. He doesn’t have a name, because in his opinion, a name doesn’t matter. He showed me certain options—certain things I could do to change my situation. He made me realize that I needed to stop drinking and taking drugs.</p><p>There is also another voice who would just scream some word and be gone. I call him “El Gringo”: the stranger. I don’t know who or what he is, and I did not understand what it meant. Later on, I would realize that it was triggered by a certain situation.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Who do you associate the voices with?</p><p><strong>Michel</strong>: The aggressive dominant voice reminds me of my free-fight instructor. I associate with his anger when people hurt my feelings or when I don’t set my boundaries. The supporting voice is more like a grandfather, and he helps me when I’m in dilemmas. The third one, I really don’t know. The only thing he does is to stimulate me to start thinking outside of the box. He’s someone who helps you explore and seek things out.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How do you respond when you hear these voices now?</p><p><strong>Michel</strong>: I take some time out, go on a walk—just give time to the voice. Something is wrong, and I have to figure out what triggered them to pop up.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Once you realize the problem, how do you resolve it?</p><p><strong>Michel</strong>: I resolved a lot of problems by learning how to communicate. Instead of punching someone in the face, you can also talk.</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: Or, say that you’re angry.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How about you, Angie—what have your experiences been like?</p><p><strong>Angie</strong>: I only started a year and a half ago, so I’m not done yet. Half the time, the voices are still there. I’ve started engaging with them though. I’ve started asking what they want and there has been improvement. I’m very hopeful that maybe one day I can reach a point similar to Michel.</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: It’s a work in progress. Angie is a Ph.D. student in economics—a high achiever.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Can you describe your voices?</p><p><strong>Angie</strong>: My voices have always had a fixed pattern —a fixed list of things they say and a fixed list of things I was forced to do for them.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>And, their personalities?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: Maybe, pick two.</p><p><strong>Angie</strong>: Which would you suggest?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: Maybe, “Sam” and “Denial.”</p><p><strong>Angie</strong>: Sam is actually the one who was most dominant in the beginning. He was very aggressive, always calling me names, and [doing] what I perceived as pushing me down. I considered him a symbol of everything that’s evil in my head. But, when I started to talk about it more in therapy, and I started to communicate more about what he was saying—why, according to him, for example, I was stupid or worthless—it actually started to change. He started to calm down. My therapist once remarked that he’s not as evil as I think he is. At first, I thought that was just an insane remark, but that moment of doubt made me think. From that moment onward, he started changing. It turned out that he was actually the one who was keeping me going. He was the one who was picking me up from my falls, and ensuring that I kept going with my daily routines as much as possible.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>And, the other one you mentioned, Denial?</p><p><strong>Angie</strong>: Denial is a very negative and aggressive voice. When he’s most aggressive, it feels like he fills all the space around me. He really freaks me out. I’m realizing more and more now that he has aspects from people in my life who hurt me. Sometimes his voice resembles someone I knew. Sometimes the message of the words that he uses are similar to some of the people I have come across in my life.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>When you engage with your voices—when you ask them what they want or why they’re saying these things—what do they say in response?</p><p><strong>Angie</strong>: It depends on the voice. It depends on his mood and my mood. It depends on how strong I am at the moment. Sometimes they do engage in conversations. Sometimes they answer your questions and they ask questions back. Other times, they refuse to engage and just shut you down. It really depends. With Sam, for example, I reached a point where I can go into a conversation with him, and he even uncovers aspects of other voices that I hear.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>I’m curious, have you ever been given a psychiatric diagnosis?</p><p><strong>Angie</strong>: Well, I got my diagnosis from Dr. Corstens.</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: What diagnosis did I give you?</p><p><strong>Angie</strong>: You gave me “dissociative disorder not otherwise specified.” I didn’t get “schizophrenia,” thank god!</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What would that have meant to you?</p><p><strong>Angie</strong>: Any diagnosis of schizophrenia for me at that point would’ve been very devastating. What’s commonly known about schizophrenia is that you just have a bad brain. That’s a conviction I’ve been holding my whole life, so I was really fearful that I might get confirmation from a psychiatrist. </p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Michel, what was your diagnosis?</p><p><strong>Michel</strong>: To be honest, I really do not know. At the beginning, I told them not to tell me, because I thought that it would destroy me. I thought that I would actually behave towards the diagnosis. Later on, I believed it was schizophrenia—but, then again, what does that mean? I don’t really care.</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: Someone did an official interview with him, and the label was indeed schizophrenia, paranoid type, but I never communicated that to him. I don’t believe in that. I don’t use that.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Because you believe that the label is self-reinforcing?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: Yes, and also because it’s not a valid diagnosis in the sense that there’s so much overlap with so many other diagnoses. There’s no one specific symptom.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What’s your opinion about the way that mainstream psychiatry treats voice-hearers?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: They treat it as a pathology, and honestly that’s the main problem. Hearing voices is normal. It’s a common human variation. It’s like homosexuality, or dyslexia, or left-handedness. My grandfather was left-handed and he was forced to write with his right hand. I think it’s similar. Hearing voices can be very difficult if you can’t accept it. You can become mad from voices, but voices by themselves are not the madness.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What does a successful treatment look like?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: It’s a complex question, but I think it’s a success if he gets a job, if she gets a partner. If people can do the things they want in life, it’s a success. And, some people without changing their symptoms, can change their lives.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Can your treatment work for anyone?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: No, because there are people who come to me who have been in psychiatry for 20 years, and they are so damaged by the system that it’s much more difficult. For example, we had one guy today—he was so traumatized by his diagnosis, and how he was treated, that it prevented him from sharing his experiences.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Do you advocate medication in any case?</p><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="204" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/10/Angie_Roc_Morin/8bd2b48c3.jpg" width="298"><figcaption class="caption">Corsten's patient Angie was diagnosed with "dissociative<br>
disorder not otherwise specified." (Roc Morin)</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: Yes, but we need to be careful. Have you read the book <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307452417/?tag=googhydr-20&amp;hvadid=45237761357&amp;hvpos=1t1&amp;hvexid=&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvrand=12516904838612553072&amp;hvpone=&amp;hvptwo=&amp;hvqmt=b&amp;hvdev=c&amp;ref=pd_sl_4hkqdnd1f0_b">Anatomy of an Epidemic</a></em>?</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>About the pharmaceutical industry? Yes, I have.</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: That really shocked me. I did some research, and more and more we’re discovering that medication is not all good. It can improve symptoms, but it can also worsen them. We don’t know who needs lifelong medication and who doesn’t. I think rather than saying people with psychosis <em>must</em> have medication, we should say, people with psychosis <em>might</em> need temporary medication. Some might need lifelong medication too, but we should be careful. It’s an open secret that people die from these medications. You don’t tell a patient suffering from psychosis that if he takes this medication for 10 years it will decrease his life expectancy by five years.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>I’m sure you’re aware that the Western world has the worst outcomes for schizophrenia. Do you see similarities between your work and approaches in the developing world?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: If you tell someone in Ethiopia that you don’t hear voices, they actually look at you funny. It’s very common to hear voices there. Seventy percent of the people in Ethiopia hear their ancestors. The best-documented results are from the open-dialogue approach in Finland. With open dialogue, the whole social network is engaged every day by two therapists. They have a remission rate of, I think, 70 percent after five years. After five years, only 30 percent take medication and 80 percent have a job. Nobody has done that before. This is not about medication. This is about talking, and engaging, and taking very seriously the utterances of the person who suffers from psychosis.</p><p><strong>Morin:</strong> That brings up a good question for you, Michel and Angie. What role do the people in your lives play in your therapy?</p><p><strong>Angie</strong>: I have told five people. My mother at the beginning was trying to convince me that it’s all in my own head, and that the voices are not real. But now, she is really doing her best to understand. I think she made a huge improvement in that respect. My boyfriend is also doing his best. I know that he’s not really able to relate, but he’s not judging, so that’s good. Two other people I told were friends of mine. We shared a very religious upbringing, so for them, it was an indication that I was possessed—something Satanic. They thought we should pray to God to remove it. So, we don’t talk about this topic anymore. The fifth person is another friend of mine, who overheard a conversation. She thinks it’s super cool that I hear voices—so, it varies.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Angie, I want to ask both you and Michel—do you want your voices to go away?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: That’s very hypothetical. It’s like asking a homosexual, “Would you like to not be a homosexual?”</p><p><strong>Michel</strong>: I would say, hell no.</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: When I met Michel for the first time, he asked, “Can you help me to get rid of these voices?” He asked for medication. I said, “Let’s wait.” In the beginning, many voice-hearers want to get rid of the voices, but when they learn to understand and to deal with the voices, they change their minds. There are people who have gotten rid of the voices and really regret it.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What do they regret?</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: That you’re not alone. That you get advice. That you are challenged. Those are things that can enrich your life.</p><p><strong>Angie</strong>: In reference to that, I remember when Sam changed and became very positive and supportive—and then there was a point when he suddenly disappeared. I remember not hearing him for about a week or two weeks. I was in tears. I missed him.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>When he returned, did he tell you where he had been?</p><p><strong>Angie</strong>: He never really came back as much as he was before. But, I think he came back because I kept calling him. “Where are you? Where are you?” Then he would make an appearance.</p><p><strong>Corstens</strong>: I also think that many voices contain intuition or unconscious information that is not very accessible to us. So, in that sense, if you have peace with your voices then it’s like dreams. Sometimes a dream tells you something about yourself or your future.</p><p><strong>Angie</strong>: It’s a privilege, in a way, to have that. But, when you’re in the process itself, it can seem like endless misery. I think it’s important to have support from someone who’s constantly assuring you that your voices have a meaning—it’s not that you’re just damaged. It makes you feel that, at least you are worthy of your suffering.</p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedDarhil Crooks/The AtlanticLearning to Live With the Voices in Your Head2014-11-05T07:40:00-05:002014-11-05T09:20:35-05:00Some experts think the problem is how doctors and society treat people who hear things, not the voices themselves.tag:theatlantic.com,2014:50-381038<p>“When a man of 80 kilos is cremated, he becomes 2.5 kilos of ashes,” Rinaldo Willy explained. “With these ashes, we make a diamond of 0.2 grams, smaller than a button on your shirt. How heavy is the soul—if we have a soul?”</p><p>In its coupling of the tangible and intangible, it is a question that epitomizes Willy’s work. Every year, <a href="http://www.algordanza.com/">Algordanza</a>, the company he founded in 2004, receives more than 800 urns filled with human ashes. For between $5,000 and $20,000, the contents of each parcel are transformed into a diamond.</p><p>It is also more than a diamond. “Maybe ‘soul’ is too strong of a word,” Willy continued, still struggling to define the essence of his product. “Our process is purely physical—but if the deceased had blue eyes, and the diamond turns out blue, you can be sure that the family will say, ‘Oh, it’s exactly the color of his eyes.’”</p><p>We were sitting on the cool leather couches of Algordanza’s simple reception room in the sleepy town of Chur, Switzerland. Tucked away high in the Alps, the town seems isolated, and yet events as diverse as the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Chilean earthquake, the Fukushima meltdown, and the terror bombings in Madrid have all sent ripples through Algordanza’s halls. Within weeks of a major incident the parcels begin to arrive. “We had a British soldier from Afghanistan recently,” Willy mentioned. “He came home and then he came to us. His body—not him, of course.”</p><p>The route from the train station in Chur to the company’s facility passes through medieval cobblestone streets, a golf course, and wildflower fields. It is a journey that many grieving clients make. “We ask that the family either brings the ashes or picks up the diamond in person,” explained Willy, 34. “For us, it’s important that they see who the people taking care of their loved ones are.” The pilgrimage to Chur is just one part of a choreography that Willy has designed around the six-month gem-making process. As one of the first companies to enter the memorial diamond business a decade ago, Algordanza, whose name means “remembrance” in the local Romansh language, has developed a tradition all its own.</p><p>“I told my staff that they are not allowed to make condolences at the beginning,” Willy said. “You don’t know the people. You don’t know their story. It’s not honest. During this process, however, we inform the clients every time we do something—for example, when the chemical analysis is done, or when we start the growing process. So, if you start to form a certain relationship—if you make chitchat, and you start to learn who the deceased was, how he died, and who the relatives are—if you feel that you want to make a condolence then, you may, because it’s honest.”</p><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="209" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/10/Algordanza_1_Roc_Morin/7535fa210.jpg" width="305"><figcaption class="caption">Rinaldo Willy displays one of his diamonds. (Roc Morin)</figcaption></figure><p>Other protocols include standing outside as the family departs until they are out of view, and delivering the finished diamond by hand inside of a polished wooden box like the one on the table before me. I watched as Willy slowly donned white cotton gloves and in a series of precise gestures unfolded the box without a sound. It opened like a flower to reveal the diamond inside on a little pyramid. “It is special to me when I am able to deliver a diamond in person,” he confided. “We do it in the living room or the kitchen with everyone around the table. It’s a very emotional moment when you are returning a family member who was away for six months. The diamonds always bring back beautiful memories. If there are tears, they are tears of happiness.”</p><p>In the laboratory down the hall, the gloves came out again. “We never touch the ashes or the diamonds with our hands,” Willy explained. “It’s too intimate for us.” He gestured towards a row of white canvas covers. “During the process when we’re waiting for the next step, we always cover the remains so that they’re not naked. We do this because we believe that’s how we would like to be treated—not as a material.”</p><p>Each set of remains is assigned a reference number, both for discretion and for the emotional health of the employees. “It helps the people working with the ashes to have a certain distance,” Willy said. “For me, the French are the most difficult. They have this philosophy to send a photograph of the deceased along with the urn. It’s difficult to see a girl of nine years. What has she seen of this life?”</p><p>In accordance with Willy’s principles of dignity, Algordanza refrains from accepting pets, adding extra carbon if there is not enough to make a diamond (except in the case of infants), and artificially coloring their gems. “Technically, we could make diamonds that are yellow, green, blue, or red, like our competitors do,” Willy insisted, “but we believe in no manipulations. As soon as you have additives, there’s something in the diamond that doesn’t belong.”</p><p>Instead of being predetermined, the color of each Algordanza diamond results from the specific combination of trace elements present in an individual’s body. Fake teeth, titanium hips, or the remnants of chemotherapy can all impact color. Nitrogen lends a yellow hue. Traces of phosphorescent chemicals can produce diamonds that glow in the dark. The blue cast that so often reminds families of the eyes of the deceased is the result of boron in the ashes, though an excess will turn a diamond black, as it did in one recent order. “I had an older gentleman calling me in tears,” Willy confessed. “He said, ‘I don’t understand. My wife was not a bad person.’ People always associate the color of the diamond with the characteristics of the person—black diamond, black soul. Go ahead, try to explain to a man in that situation that his wife is not a bad person.”</p><p>Despite the occasional disappointment, Willy said, most clients are grateful for the service his company provides. “Memorial diamonds are changing the way we mourn,” he explained. “When you bury someone, you always have a bad conscience. You have to visit him at the cemetery. Nobody likes to go to the cemetery. It’s a negative association. You start to imagine him under the earth with worms in his body. If you cremate somebody, it’s black and it’s dirty. Diamonds though, have always had a positive association. We turn dirty ashes and bones into something beautiful. Instead of feeling loss, you can remember that person’s life.”</p><figure><img alt="" height="380" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/10/Algordanza_2_Roc_Morin/cb2859612.jpg" width="570"><figcaption class="caption">Willy stands next to Algordanza's diamond presses. (Roc Morin)</figcaption></figure><p>Most of Algordanza’s diamonds are eventually crafted into jewelry, worn by clients who want to be able to carry the presence of their loved ones with them at all times. “Many people talk to their diamonds,” Willy remarked. “If a wife wears her husband’s diamond in a necklace, there are the usual jokes: ‘He was always wishing to be between my breasts,’ or ‘He wanted to be close to my heart.’”</p><p>Some customers bury their diamonds in meaningful places. One widower threw his gem into the lake where he likes to fish. “There was another older man, a farmer who was dying of cancer,” Willy recalled. “He said, ‘When you make me into a diamond, just bury it in the backyard. One day when somebody finds me—can you imagine how happy that person will be?’ I said, ‘Lutzi, you’re crazy.’ But I thought it was beautiful to be confronted with death and still think about the happiness of others.”</p><p>As we talked, the director led us out a back door. We strolled through the mountain fog towards a soft humming sound. The hum intensified as we entered the building that houses Algordanza’s three diamond presses. Day and night they buzz with the quiet violence of the forces they replicate—transcendental cataclysms deep inside the earth. It is here, at temperatures reaching 2,500°F and pressures of nearly 800,000 pounds per square inch, that the carbon extracted from human ashes is transfigured into diamonds. We paused to listen. There was a cadence to the droning that sounded almost like chanting. The 18-ton machines looked like enormous idols. Willy laughed when I compared them to Aztec gods.</p><p>“This could be a kind of temple,” he considered. “We hope that in five years we can construct a new building here, maybe a cathedral for the machines.”</p><p>We talked about how jewels are used as spiritual metaphors in so many of the world’s religions. I mentioned the Buddhist belief that pearl-like objects called <em>śarīra</em> can be found in the cremated ashes of spiritual masters.</p><p>“Yes,” Willy smiled. “We had a party of South Koreans visiting who offered us some of those gems to analyze. It was clear to us that someone must have slipped them into the mouth of the corpse, or maybe the person swallowed them before he died. We can prove chemically where gems come from, and these were clearly from a mine. They were not organic. It was interesting to us though, because it helps us understand the way people think—if you are a good person, then in your ashes, you leave a gem.”</p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedLuke MacGregor / ReutersWhere the Dead Become Diamonds2014-10-14T11:30:00-04:002018-03-26T11:22:25-04:00A Swiss company wants to change the way people mourn by transforming the remains of their loved ones into gems.tag:theatlantic.com,2014:50-380825<p>“In the Second World War,” Samuel Zook began, “my ancestors were conscientious objectors because we don’t believe in combat.” The Amish farmer paused a moment to inspect a mottled leaf on one of his tomato plants before continuing. “If you really stop and think about it, though, when we go out spraying our crops with pesticides, that’s really what we’re doing. It’s chemical warfare, bottom line.”</p><p>Eight years ago, it was a war that Zook appeared to be losing. The crops on his 66-acre farm were riddled with funguses and pests that chemical treatments did little to reduce. The now-39-year-old talked haltingly about the despair he felt at the prospect of losing a homestead passed down through five generations of his family. Disillusioned by standard agriculture methods, Zook searched fervently for an alternative. He found what he was looking for in the writings of an 18-year-old Amish farmer from Ohio, a man named John Kempf.</p><p>Kempf is the unlikely founder of <a href="http://www.advancingecoag.com/">Advancing Eco Agriculture</a>, a consulting firm established in 2006 to promote science-intensive organic agriculture. The entrepreneur’s story is almost identical to Zook’s. A series of crop failures on his own farm drove the 8th grade-educated Kempf to school himself in the sciences. For two years, he pored over research in biology, chemistry, and agronomy in pursuit of a way to save his fields. The breakthrough came from the study of plant immune systems which, in healthy plants, produce an array of compounds that are toxic to intruders. “The immune response in plants is dependent on well-balanced nutrition,” Kempf concluded, “in much the same way as our own immune system.” Modern agriculture uses fertilizer specifically to increase yields, he added, with little awareness of the nutritional needs of other organic functions. Through plant sap analysis, Kempf has been able to discover deficiencies in important trace minerals which he can then introduce into the soil. With plants able to defend themselves, pesticides can be avoided, allowing the natural predators of pests to flourish.</p><p>According to Kempf, the methods he developed through experimentation on his Ohio farm are now being used across North and South America, Hawaii, Europe, and Africa. The entrepreneur promises clients higher-quality crops, bigger yields, better taste, and produce that carries a lucrative “organic” label. Kempf, however, considers his process as an important improvement upon standard organic farming methods. “Organic certification is a negative-process certification,” he explained, “You can do nothing to your field and become certified. In contrast, we focus on actively restoring the balance found in natural systems.”</p><p>I recently sought out Samuel Zook, one of Kempf’s earliest converts, at his farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania to see Advancing Eco Agriculture’s practices in action. After trailing a leisurely horse and carriage in my car for several miles, I was greeted at the farm by a bounding dog and Zook’s young barefoot son. The boy stared silently with his arms wrapped around a watermelon almost as big as himself. In a straw hat and suspenders, he looked like a miniature version of his father. The elder Zook smiled demurely through a neatly trimmed beard and extended his hand before inviting me on a tour of his fields. A hushed gaggle of children tripped along behind us as we walked among the bales of hay and rows of tomatoes, onions, melons, and squash.</p><hr><p><strong>Roc Morin: </strong>Can you describe the differences between how you used to farm and how you farm now?</p><p><strong>Samuel Zook: </strong>The inputs changed drastically. Instead of trying to grow crops that are healthy with fungicides and pesticides, I started to grow crops that are healthy with nutrition.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What was the hardest part about making the change?</p><p><strong>Zook: </strong>Well, there was a big psychological block that I had to get through. I’d see a couple bugs out there and feel like I immediately had to do something about it. But, I learned that if I sit back, things will often take care of themselves. That first summer for instance, we saw a lot of horn worms. Before that, I would have sprayed them right away, but this time I waited and a bunch of wasps came along and killed them. Once I saw that, I started getting really excited.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>So, when you use a pesticide you’re killing the predators too, right?</p><p><strong>Zook: </strong>Right. You’re killing the entire ecosystem.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Have all of your problems disappeared?</p><p><strong>Zook: </strong>I wish I could say that, but not entirely. We’re not living in the Garden of Eden yet. The issues I had before have disappeared, but we still have some other issues that we’re working on. One of the main things that has improved is how it feels to farm. Before, if I applied fungicide on my tomatoes, I had to wait three to seven days before I could reenter the area. Now, it’s so nice to just walk in my field any day of the week and not worry a bit. That in itself is huge. The other thing is, when I used to mix these skull-and-cross-bones chemicals to put in my sprayer, I’d have to be suited up. The children would be around and I’d say, “Now, get in the house. It’s not safe.” Now though, if the children want to help, it’s fine. If I want to mix the solutions better, I’ll just put my hand in a stir it around.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What are some of the problems that you’re dealing with now<strong>?</strong></p><p><strong>Zook: </strong>One of my major issues in the greenhouse is spider mites—little insects that just love a warm, dry environment. It’s very hard to control them, even conventionally. We usually get them under control, but we often lose some yield.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>How do you get them under control?</p><p><strong>Zook: </strong>Mainly through applying specific trace minerals like iodine and a whole line of ultra-micronutrients. We analyzed the sap of the plants with the help of a lab and I think we’ve narrowed the problem down to excessive ammonium nitrates. If ammonia builds up in the plants, it’s bug food, so we need to figure out a way to convert ammonia fast. I just spent two days with John [Kempf], and he came up with an enzyme cofactor which we’ll use to stimulate that ammonia conversion. We figure things out ourselves now rather than call up the chemical rep.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What did your chemical rep say when you told him that you didn’t need his services anymore?</p><p><strong>Zook: </strong>Well, that was an interesting summer. He used to come here every week telling me horror stories about all the diseases in the neighborhood. But, I had made up my made up my mind, “No mas.” He came back every week for eight weeks telling me what I needed to spray. I said, “I’m fine, thanks.” The last time he was here, we were out picking tomatoes and he walked over. He was looking around and talking about this and that, and he didn’t even mention pesticides. “Well,” he said, “your tomatoes look pretty good.” I thought, “Yes!”</p><!-- START "MORE ON" SINGLE STORY BOX v. 2 --><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><!-- END "MORE ON" SINGLE STORY BOX v. 2 --><p><strong>Morin: </strong>One thing that I immediately noticed is how great everything smells here. Do you still smell it, or are you accustomed to it?</p><p><strong>Zook: </strong>Oh, I smell it every time I come here. It’s exciting. Those aromas are actually compounds the plants produce to defend themselves from insects and disease attacks. A lot of people don’t realize that plants have immune systems.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>So, you can smell health—can you can smell problems too?</p><p><strong>Zook: </strong>Yes. There’s a real science to walking through a field and pausing to feel what the plants are feeling. There’s a huge difference between walking in this field and walking in one that has had six fungicide applications. The plants just don’t radiate that same vitality. Another thing I learned is that every time you spray with a fungicide or something, it’s actually suppressing the plant as well as the fungi.</p><p><strong>Morin:</strong> The same way that antibiotics can weaken a person’s immune system?</p><p><strong>Zook: </strong>Yes. It might kill the disease, but then because it has weakened the plant, a week later the plant is much more susceptible to that same disease again. That’s the way it is with miticide. If I come in here and spray the mites with it, it would kill some of them, but it kills by messing with their hormones, so the ones that do survive will then mature 50 percent faster. So, it’s pretty much guaranteed that I’d have a huge mite outbreak 10 years later. Instead of doing that, let’s figure out what this plant wants and provide it. They really do respond.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>What else can you tell by looking at your plants?</p><p><strong>Zook: </strong>Well, one thing we learn is to read the leaves. This asymmetry here indicates zinc deficiency. The spots over here indicate a phosphorus deficiency. And, this here rippling of the leaf usually indicates excess nitrogen.</p><p><strong>Morin: </strong>Before you started with this method were you able to read the leaves?</p><p><strong>Zook: </strong>You know, I barely noticed them at all. I just planted and sprayed. Now, it’s much more fun.</p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedAmy Sancetta / APThe Amish Farmers Reinventing Organic Agriculture2014-10-06T10:15:00-04:002018-07-05T11:28:41-04:00By studying the immune systems of plants, they've developed a technique that eliminates the need for chemicals.tag:theatlantic.com,2014:50-361058<p>“I was 6 or 7,” Rob Rhinehart began, “and I guess my mother was serving salad. I was looking down at a plate with these leaves on it. I could look outside and see leaves on the trees, and it just seemed a little weird. It seemed a little primitive - like something an animal would do. On this nice plate, in this nice house, why would I eat this thing that grows on trees? I thought, ‘We can do better.’”</p><p>“Better,” for the now 25-year-old Rhinehart, is Soylent, a beige beverage that he claims contains every nutrient the body needs. With tongue firmly in cheek, he named it after the ubiquitous food substitute Soylent Green found in the dystopian science fiction movie of the same name. For 30 days, the software engineer turned kitchen chemist consumed nothing but Soylent and <a href="http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298">reported his progress on a blog.</a> With the help of an enthusiastic online community, he honed his formula, raised $3 million from investors, and is now bringing his product to the market.</p><p>I sat down with Rob at a Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles in January to talk about the future of food. He drank black coffee while I sipped Soylent from a chilled metal thermos he had brought.</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p><strong>This is pretty good. It tastes a bit like unsweetened custard.</strong></p><p>What I’ve found is that a lot of people who like the idea, like the taste, and a lot of people who don’t like the idea are repelled by the taste. Because it has so little intrinsic taste, it pretty much comes from your expectation. </p><p><strong>I have to say, of all places, I was surprised that you invited me to a restaurant.</strong></p><p>[Laughter] I mean, where else are we going to meet? All of our societal rituals revolve around eating.</p><p><strong>And you’d like to change that?</strong></p><p>I’m looking forward to the point where we don’t have to worry about hunger, or nutrition. Where people make food just because it’s beautiful—like gardening, or painting. I’m looking forward to the point where food can just be art.</p><p><strong>When I first heard about Soylent—one substance designed to fulfill all nutritional needs—I thought it sounded a lot like breast milk.</strong></p><p>That’s a good point.</p><p><strong>Have you looked at the similarities?</strong></p><p>I have, and actually I’m even more interested in the similarities between breast milk and formula. As far as safety control and completeness are concerned, formula is actually better. Natural isn’t always best. </p><p><strong>So, why do you think there’s a such a strong movement pushing for natural and unprocessed food?</strong></p><p>Mostly I think there’s just an emotional attachment to culture and tradition. People have this belief that just because something is natural it’s good. The natural state of man is ignorant, and starving, and cold. We have technology that makes our lives better. It doesn’t make sense that you would keep technology out of this very important part of life.</p><p><strong>I hear emotion in your appeal as well. Do you resent having to eat?</strong></p><p>You know, with my body, I just don’t want it to be a burden. I would rather enjoy things because I want to, not because I have to.</p><p><strong>So, how do you overcome that bias against consuming something as synthetic as Soylent?</strong></p><p>With data—lots of data. If you talk to biologists or doctors, you’ll see that the biochemical pathways are the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re consuming fresh vegetables or a multivitamin because the nutrients are exactly the same. We make our eating decisions pretty shallowly. It’s mostly based on what it looks like, what it smells like, and what we grew up eating. There’s not a lot of in-depth analysis. Food is very complicated. It’s made of thousands of different chemicals and it’s not really pragmatic to test all of them individually.</p><p><strong>So, even something as basic as an apple or a tomato…</strong></p><p>I mean, honestly, nutritionally speaking, canned vegetables are better than fresh ones because fresh ones are decaying. They’re out in the air being oxidized. Bacteria are feasting on them. But if you can them, you seal them at the peak of freshness and the nutrients stay intact. So, it seems kind of backwards I think, actually, to go for fresh. Why are these foods seen as healthy? Looking at all of these hundreds of different plant metabolites, that’s kind of missing the point because a lot of those things that have been tested are harmful. It’s just intuitive on principle, these plants are not on our side. These plants did not evolve to feed us. If they could kill us, they probably would. It’s competition.</p><p><strong>Many of them do. I’ve got a book called Poisonous Plants of North America on my shelf and it’s a pretty thick book.</strong></p><p>Right. The only reason we eat most of the plants that we do is because we’ve changed them. We’ve engineered them over hundreds if not thousands of years. You know, the carrot is a new invention. Lettuce changed, cauliflower changed, bananas definitely changed. Bananas are not supposed to taste as good as they do. Carrots look and taste better after we steered their evolution. It makes a lot of sense to optimize them to be more effective.</p><p><strong>It’s funny that you mention the carrot, since it’s so closely related to water hemlock, one of the world’s most poisonous plants.</strong></p><p>Tapioca too. If you ate a raw cassava plant, it’s toxic. It has to be processed. All of these old traditional cooking processes are about making the plant less toxic.</p><p><strong>Right, even though paradoxically, cooking often produces a lot of carcinogens.</strong></p><p>It does. Especially if things get burned. And, you know, there’s very poor control of produce. If something’s coming from a garden or a field, you don’t know how much lead or arsenic is in the soil.</p><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="346" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/04/soylent/652c5efda.png" width="337"><figcaption class="credit"><em>Soylent.me</em></figcaption></figure><p><strong>And with Soylent, you’re able to know exactly what you’re consuming at all times, right?</strong></p><p>Precisely. We have testing data about everything in there. Everything is tested rigorously. We worry about a lot of things so that the user doesn’t have to.</p><p><strong>So, I understand that you’re living almost entirely on Soylent now.</strong></p><p>That’s right.</p><p><strong>What was that transition like for you?</strong></p><p>Well, for one thing, I did not expect to get healthier. But when I first switched over, I felt amazing. I mean, I never felt that good. I don’t know if there’s any science to detoxing, but that’s kind of how I felt. I felt like I had been hungover, for years, and all of a sudden I was out of it. I mean, my diet was pretty poor before, and some of the benefits probably came from me starting to exercise, but the energy to exercise came from having a better diet. The main thing for me, though, is not having that hassle—not having to worry about food all the time. You know, trying to get myself 2,400 calories every single day in a balanced fashion, avoiding simple sugars and saturated fats, not spending too much money, not spending too much time. That’s a full-time job.</p><p><strong>What were some of the discoveries you made along the way?</strong></p><p>Well, I started varying a bunch of different parameters, one at a time. People say Americans get too much sodium, so I wondered, how much do I really need? So, I dropped down the sodium and then started to feel very mentally foggy. So, I realized, obviously you need some sodium. And then, I underdosed and overdosed on potassium, and calcium, and magnesium, and phosphorus. And every time, I kept coming back to the levels recommended by the Institute of Medicine.</p><p><strong>How did you know you had overdosed or underdosed?</strong></p><p>Well, too much potassium was terrible. I had really bad heart arrhythmia. Magnesium poisoning was brutal, really painful. I felt like my insides were burning. It was so bad, I almost gave up. But the next day, when I went back to a normal level, I was fine.</p><p><strong>Did that change your outlook at all, to actually experience the importance of each and every nutrient?</strong></p><p>Absolutely, just seeing the biological basis of “You are what you eat.” Your body is literally building these proteins out of the things you’re putting in it. What’s fascinating to me is not so much that I can live on something that’s designed deliberately, but how well the body manages to live on the random stuff that we eat. It’s such an adaptable, remarkable system.</p><p><strong>So, I’m wondering how efficient you can get with all of this. If you’re consuming only essential nutrients and everything is used, it must cut down on bodily waste significantly. How close can you get to zero waste? </strong></p><p>Well, there will always be something, because waste comes from other places too - dead red blood cells, for example. But if you were as elemental as possible, there would be a very, very small amount, primarily because most of the waste is due to fiber. It’s your gut bacteria. So, if you let those die off, there will be precious little waste. That’s basically what I did by consuming very, very little fiber. And, I felt great. But, when I would try to eat normal food again, it was very, very painful, because I didn’t have the bacteria to digest it. So, that was the trade-off. </p><p><strong>I can see that being helpful in areas without adequate sanitation.</strong></p><p>Definitely.</p><p><strong>What kinds of things do your critics say?</strong></p><p>They say a lot of things. I’ve gotten some pretty nasty emails.</p><p><strong>Like what?</strong></p><p>I don’t know. They just say they hope that Soylent gives me cancer. </p><p><strong>That’s terrible.</strong></p><p>I didn’t mean to offend anybody. But, people seem a little offended. </p><p><strong>So, who is Soylent’s target audience?</strong></p><p>I mean, everyone has to eat, so I think this could help a lot of people. Currently we’re seeing a lot of interest from younger, educated males—people who are just busy or passionate about something. There are a lot of grad students, single parents, and business travelers.</p><p><strong>How about the poor or people in developing countries?</strong></p><p>Definitely. Especially in places like China, where people are spending half of their income on food. I mean, imagine if you were spending more on food than rent. Right now, Soylent provides about three calories per penny. Hopefully in time we can get the cost down even more. I think in the near future we may be able to get it down to five dollars a day. That would cover someone on food stamps. Ultimately, I would like it to be produced almost ephemerally. If food was just taken care of. If food was just a utility, like water coming out of the tap. If it was just there.</p><p align="center">* * *</p><p>After the interview, I pulled out my camera to take an ironic photograph of Rob in front of a nearby lemon tree.</p><p>“Where else would you like to stand?” I asked.</p><p>“Maybe it’s a strange request,” he replied, “but how about in front of my new car? I haven’t had a picture taken with it yet.”</p><p>“Of course,” I said. “Lead the way.”</p><figure><img alt="" height="380" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/04/2-2/95f5782f9.jpg" width="570"><figcaption class="credit">Roc Morin</figcaption></figure><p>As we walked to the parking lot, I asked if the new car had been bought with money from Soylent’s recent windfall. “It actually came from a Bitcoin investment,” Rob replied. He had seen the potential early on.</p><p>As we entered the lot, I scanned the rows for sports cars, trying to guess which was his. Rob strolled over to a beat-up old pickup truck.</p><p>“You bought this to haul all your money?” I teased.</p><p>He laughed. “It’s useful for hauling all kinds of things.”</p><p>After posing for a few photos, Rob climbed in and tried the engine. It just groaned and wheezed. “She does this sometimes,” he explained.</p><p>Finally, the pickup roared to life.</p><p>“I thought it was going to be a Ferrari,” I yelled over the engine’s racket.</p><p>“Ferraris are wasteful!” he shouted back, grinning, as the pickup pulled off and slipped into the endless gridlock of a Beverly Hills afternoon. </p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedRoc MorinRob Rhinehart, inventor of SoylentThe Man Who Would Make Food Obsolete2014-04-28T13:00:00-04:002014-04-28T13:00:47-04:00Rob Rhinehart invented Soylent&mdash;a beverage that he claims contains all necessary nutrients&mdash;as a food replacement. The first batch is shipping this month.tag:theatlantic.com,2014:50-360625<figure><img alt="" height="345" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/04/BCCR_Proof_1439/9fa8d2dfa.jpg" width="570"><figcaption class="caption">The room at the Bluestone Center for Clinical Research where patients take hallucinogens. (NYU)</figcaption></figure><p>“Some of the things I’m about to say might not make sense,” began O.M., a 22-year-old cancer survivor. He had the far-off look in his eyes that I recognized from so many of the other study participants. They sound like travelers, struggling to describe exotic foreign lands to the people left back home. That struggle is a sign that the treatment has worked. Ineffability is one of the primary criteria that define a mystical experience.</p><p>“I was outside of my body, looking at myself,” O.M. continued, “My body was lying on a stretcher in front of a hospital. I felt an incredible anxiety—the same anxiety I had felt every day since my diagnosis. Then, like a switch went on, I went from being anxious to analyzing my anxiety from the outside. I realized that nothing was actually happening to me objectively. It was real because I let it become real. And, right when I had that thought, I saw a cloud of black smoke come out of my body and float away.”</p><p>The encounter with the black smoke was just one of many experiences that O.M. had that day. As his mind, “like a rocket,” traversed vast expanses, his body never left the comfortable and well-worn couch at the Bluestone Center for Clinical Research in Midtown Manhattan. The athletic first-year medical student is one of 32 participants in a New York University study examining the hallucinogen psilocybin as a treatment for cancer-related anxiety.</p><p>For O.M., that anxiety had been crippling. Diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma at the age of 21, the then-pre-med student at first refused to accept reality. “I’m pretty domineering,” he laughed. “I told the nurses, ‘I can’t have this right now.’ I thought I could negotiate with cancer.” That domineering spirit served O.M. well through six rounds of chemotherapy. He even looked forward, he insisted, to the debilitating side-effects of his cancer-killing infusions. Enduring them gave him a sense of agency. He could withstand the punishment; his cancer could not. Only when the treatments ended, with his cancer in remission, was O.M. consumed by a feeling of abject helplessness. The fight was over. From that day on, all he could do was wait to see whether the cancer would return.</p><p>“When I first met him, he had calluses all over his neck,” explained research manager Gabrielle Agin-Liebes. “He would constantly feel his lymph nodes as a habit, to see if they had grown. Even as he was talking to you, his hand would be up there feeling his neck. Ironically, that would make the lymph nodes swell up even more.”</p><p>“He had one of the highest ratings on the anxiety scale that we had seen: 21 out of 30,” Gabrielle continued. “To qualify for the study you only need an eight. The day after his first dosing session, he dropped to zero, and for seven months he’s stayed there. Zero anxiety.” The black cloud had carried it all away.</p><p>Psilocybin, found naturally in more than 200 species of mushrooms, has a long history of use by humans. Called “flesh of the gods” by the Aztecs, the mushrooms were widely consumed in religious ceremonies by pre-contact indigenous cultures throughout the Americas. Cave paintings in Spain and Algeria suggest ritualized <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928025.400-earliest-evidence-for-magic-mushroom-use-in-europe.html#.U0gma_ldWPs">ingestion</a> dating back as far as 9,000 years. Brutally suppressed by Christian authorities on both sides of the Atlantic, indigenous psilocybin use was nearly eradicated <a href="http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1613675,00.html">until the late 195o’s</a> when Western psychiatry rediscovered it.</p><p>In the years after World War II, hallucinogen-aided therapy was a rapidly growing field. Conditions as diverse as alcoholism, drug addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety were treated. In the quarter century that followed, 40,000 patients were given psilocybin and other <a href="http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/25/10544.full">hallucinogens</a> such as DMT, LSD, and mescaline. More than 1000 research papers were produced. The results were very promising, though as the NYU study’s principal investigator Dr. Stephen Ross explained, much of the research lacked proper oversight. “They didn’t understand set and setting in the beginning. Patients would be injected with LSD, put in restraints, and somebody would come back hours later. They were put in very drab clinical environments. Then you had people like Timothy Leary and his group over at Harvard who were using the drugs themselves, using them with famous people, and recklessly promoting psychedelics within American culture.”</p><p>The government soon took notice. As paranoia grew within the Nixon Administration over the rise of a drug-fueled counterculture, regulation became a priority. Creeping legislation culminated in the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. The law created five schedules of increasing severity under which drugs were to be classified. Psilocybin was rushed into the most restrictive Schedule I, alongside MDMA, marijuana, and heroin. The classification was reserved for drugs that, by definition, have a “high potential for abuse,” “no currently accepted medical use,” and a “lack of accepted safety.” The act signaled the end of psychedelics research in America for nearly 25 years.</p><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="229" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/04/Dr._Ross/77331b971.jpg" width="200"><figcaption class="caption">Dr. Stephen Ross</figcaption></figure><p>The research made a slow comeback starting in the mid-90’s, but the stigma remains. “The only thing I learned about psychedelics in psychiatry training is that they were toxic,” Dr. Ross explained. “We were told that they cause psychosis. I’d also heard the old urban legends: that they cause chromosomal damage, and that if you take seven hits of LSD you go insane. But, I knew nothing about their history in psychology and in mental health, which had been considerable.”</p><p>The soft-spoken psychiatrist first came to NYU under a fellowship to do research on drug addiction. In his search for novel treatments for intractable conditions, Ross stumbled upon a decades-old study in which LSD had been used to successfully cure alcoholism. “I was shocked,” he admitted. “As a Schedule I drug, I assumed that LSD must be very addictive. But that simply wasn’t true. It does not behave like an addictive drug by any measure. I was even more shocked to find out that Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, got sober from a psychedelics-induced mystical experience. He was so impressed that he <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/23/lsd-help-alcoholics-theory">actually wanted to introduce it into the bylaws of AA</a>.” </p><p>As for the toxicity Dr. Ross had been warned about in medical school, “There are simply no known long-term toxic effects from taking serotonergic hallucinogens,” he explained. “From a medical perspective, psilocybin is a remarkably safe compound.”</p><p>The Drug Enforcement Agency takes a different view. As a condition of Dr. Ross’s Schedule I license, the compound is stored in a restricted area inside a two ton safe. “It’s the only drug in the safe,” Dr. Ross elaborated, “and Monday through Friday, we take the drug out once a day and weigh it. Three people have to sign off on it.” That security is a stark reminder that distribution of psilocybin without a DEA license is a federal crime carrying penalties of up to 20 years in prison for a first offense. </p><p>The intense scrutiny has produced a rigorous methodology. The NYU team screens every applicant for personal and family mental illness, health conditions, and substance abuse history. “We’ve had to be perfect,” Dr. Ross concluded. Additionally, each patient participates in months of intensive psychotherapy before and after treatment. “They undergo an extensive review of their life,” Dr. Ross explained. “The goal is to try to construct a new narrative around cancer.”</p><p>An important part of that narrative is death. “We don’t die well in America,” co-principal investigator and palliative care specialist Dr. Anthony Bossis explained. “It’s the most taboo conversation in medicine. I think for much of healthcare, it represents a failure on the part of the provider. Most people die in ICUs with tubes throughout their bodies and not in a spiritual state.”</p><p>“Our patients come in with a kind of demoralization syndrome reminiscent of post-traumatic stress disorder,” co-principal investigator Dr. Jeffrey Guss added. “Cancer for them is an enormous existential crisis. Life becomes nothing but, ‘my chemo, my radiation, my cancer numbers.’ Life outside of cancer shrinks. They’re petrified by death. They become immobilized. The whole point is to dislodge them from that. What’s remarkable is that even though we don’t tell them what narratives to form, there is an enormous commonality. Patients will come to me and say, ‘I understand intuitively now that love is truly the most important force on the planet. I experienced a profound sense of peace that I never felt before and it has stayed with me. I know now that my consciousness is bigger than me.’”</p><p>Dr. Bossis sees a spiritual implication. “Those concepts form the basis for so many religions: Christ-consciousness, Buddha-nature, Samadi in Hindu, Satori in Zen… There’s all this overlap. They speak the words of the mystics without ever having read them.”</p><p>Still, the experiences are not all positive. Many sensations are deeply troubling. Patients have reported bouts of intense anxiety, frightening imagery, or even the temporary belief that they have died. “Psilocybin is not an agent of universal good,” explained the study’s administrative director Alexander Belser. “It acts as a remarkable amplifier of things. It amplifies the good and the bad. We have done everything in the course of this study to create a context that brings out the good. We spent a lot of time choosing who the therapists would be. We spent a lot of time thinking about how to develop rapport and trust. We spent a lot of time on the room.”</p><p>The room at Bluestone is warm and inviting. An abstract painting of soft cloudy pastels hangs on the wall. Stone mushrooms, tribal artifacts, and fresh flowers decorate the space. The patients arrive at 9am on the day of their dosing session. To help them feel at home, they are invited to bring a few personal items: photographs of family and friends, stuffed animals, or religious paraphernalia. They are welcomed at the door by a team of two therapists who will not leave their side for the next eight hours—a full psychedelic work day.</p><p>Crucially, each participant is shown the two medications they will have access to on demand throughout their trip. One is Valium, used to reduce anxiety, and the other is Zyprexa, an almost instantaneous antidote to the psychedelic. In a testament to the thorough mental preparation the study provides, the medications have never been requested by any of the patients. The psilocybin itself is presented in pill-form inside a ceramic chalice.</p><p>The therapists and the patient perform a ritual in which the intention for the day is set and ropes are bound together, signifying everyone’s interconnectedness. The subject is directed to don an eye mask and headset and to lie on the couch. The headset plays six hours of rhythmic wordless music from around the world. The music is one more nod to the ancient shamanic traditions that the research team has borrowed from.</p><p>What happens next is unique for every patient. O.M. traveled halfway around the world to embrace the family he left behind in his native country. He traveled inside of his own neck to see that the swollen lymph nodes he had hated so intensely were actually filled with clear, benign fluid. Hate turned to love when he realized that they were a part of him. D.B., a life-long atheist grasping for words, felt bathed in what she could only describe as “God’s love.” Estalyn Walcoff, a white woman, stained her mask with tears as she viscerally felt the pain of hundreds of years of slavery and “the interconnectedness that runs through us all.”</p><p>Nick Fernandez entered a cave. “I’m outside of my body,” he recalled nearly a year after it happened, with a “realer than real” immediacy that still could only be expressed in present tense. “My body is on a clothing hanger. I’m walking around it, looking at it, deciding if I want to choose it or not. I’m thinking about my body in terms of all the people my body has ever had sex with, all the food that’s ever gone into it, all the chemotherapy, all the exercise, all the shit that’s ever come out of it. I pictured my parents conceiving me, making this body. Everything I can imagine that’s happened to this body in 26 years, I saw. It’s like when you shop for a new car and they say it has 30,000 miles, and was in this crash, and this happened to it. And, I was outside of this body walking around it thinking, ‘Should I get this body or not?’ I eventually decided that I would. And, when I entered into my body, honestly, I felt like a superhero putting on his suit for the first time. It was the first time since I’ve been sick that I came to terms with what my body was. It wasn’t this thing that I wanted to be better, that I wished didn’t have cancer. I said, ‘This is my body and I choose to take it as my vehicle in this life.’ And, I think the message is, that you don’t get to choose. This is what you get. Use it well.” Nearly a year later, Nick still thinks about that message every day.</p><p>The data from the study is still being analyzed, but anecdotally Dr. Ross and his team report that the vast majority of their patients have exhibited an immediate and sustained reduction in anxiety. Consistent with similar studies involving psilocybin, approximately three-fourths of the participants rate their experience with the drug as being one of the top five most significant events of their lives.</p><p>I asked Dr. Ross how a medication taken only once can have such an enduring effect. “One way to think of it,” he replied, “is that these experiences are profoundly memorable. When something really bad happens, PTSD can occur. It activates the amygdala where emotional memories are formed. Symptoms can last for years. Dramatic negative events can create symptoms for long period of time, and it seems that way with very positive experiences too. In my own life, I think about the birth of my kids. It was a profound event that caused great changes in my life. I think these psychedelic events are similar to that.”</p><p>I sat across the table from O.M., examining his perfectly normal neck. He smiled as he demonstrated the way he used to palpate his lymph nodes – fingers curling expertly into position behind his left ear like those of a virtuoso violinist. “Now, in medical school, I’m learning to palpate other people’s lymph nodes,” he added. “I’m the best.”</p><p>His hands dropped easily back onto the table, resting peacefully there before him. It was hard to imagine that this man had ever been sick.</p><p>“At the hospital they gave me Xanax for anxiety,” he said. “Xanax doesn’t get rid of your anxiety. Xanax tells you not to feel it for awhile until it stops working and you take the next pill. The beauty of psilocybin is: it’s not medication. You’re not taking it and it solves your problem. You take it and you solve your problem yourself.” </p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedKelly Sikkema/flickrPrescribing Mushrooms for Anxiety2014-04-22T08:00:00-04:002014-04-22T08:00:51-04:00A New York University research team is using hallucinogenic experiences to help patients come to terms with their mortality.tag:theatlantic.com,2014:50-284219<p>“She was chit-chatty at first,” began full-spectrum doula Annie Robinson, describing one of her first clients. “She didn’t seem anxious, didn’t seem like she particularly had much to say. And then, the [abortion] procedure began and I stood beside her, holding her hand, and she went into this other zone. She turned to me and just started going back in time to when she was six years old, eight years old, just telling me these horrific stories of sexual violence—abuse that her body had been subject to. It was astounding to witness—to feel palpably how the body holds memory—holds trauma. It was profound and it was an honor to be there. When we’re seized by something that needs to be shared, it’s so crucial for someone to be there to receive it, because to share it is to let it go.”</p><p>Robinson is one of over 20 volunteers for <a href="http://www.doulaproject.org/">The Doula Project</a>, a New York City-based nonprofit organization. The organization was started in 2007 as a way to provide caregivers to women undergoing abortions. In the words of the project’s mission statement, their doulas offer “all of the benefits of what is typically known to be the territory of birth doulas: pain management and relaxation techniques, information and education about pregnancy, and above all, emotional support and empathy.”</p><p>In 2009, the project expanded to encompass birth-work as well, though the majority of their clients are still women terminating pregnancies.</p><p>I met with the 27-year-old Robinson to discuss her experiences in this role over the past two years.</p><hr><p><strong>Why is the work of The Doula Project important?</strong></p><p>I believe that when you’re going through something that’s morally and physically exhausting and confusing, it’s so important to be seen—to have your emotions and your physical being recognized and acknowledged. It’s important for the providers too. I mean, provider burnout, and distress, and trauma is something I’m very concerned about as well. I think the presence of a doula there, modeling compassion in a very cold and often sterile environment, has repercussions for the experience of everyone involved.</p><p><strong>Where does your compassion come from?</strong></p><p>I think we’re all compassionate, and we can sometimes lose touch with our inherent ability. So, one of my themes in this work and in my life is self-care. When you’re practicing self-care you’re able to more easily conjure forth that compassion. For me, the more well I feel, the more able I am to be present for somebody else.</p><p><strong style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 23px;">How do your clients react to your presence?</strong></p><p>Sometimes I’ll encounter clients who are incredibly emotional and incredibly forthcoming. Others are just silent and shut down and in their box—going through the motions. Regardless, I have to bring the same core of compassion and offer it in different ways to all of these different clients. Not all of them are interested in receiving it. Of the seven I was with yesterday, five of them were not really interested in connecting. They don’t want to make eye contact. They’re resistant to my offered hand.</p><p>They’re not interested in communication, so it challenges me to get creative as to how I can provide compassionate care to someone who is seemingly not wanting to receive it. I believe, nonetheless, that they’re still being affected by my presence, even on an unconscious level.</p><p><strong style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 23px;">Why do you think they don’t want compassion?</strong></p><p><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 23px;">It’s not that they don’t want the compassion, they just don’t want connection. They just don’t want to be anchored in this moment, perhaps because it’s too much. It gets too real, or it gets too painful. We all have moments in life where we just don’t want to acknowledge where we are right now. To connect with somebody, and to receive what somebody is offering brings you quickly into the present moment, and sometimes people just want to avoid that. And, that’s okay. That’s their way of coping.</span></p><p><strong>Do you experience any of those negative emotions yourself?</strong></p><p>First of all, I would say that I don’t consider any emotions negative. I consider some emotions challenging. But, all are important to be having and valuable towards healing if you’re really experiencing them. I’m challenged all the time, both emotionally and cognitively. There are certainly moments where I question myself and feel frustrated and feel hurt. But, all of that needs to be taken outside and dealt with on my own time. I’m there to receive and hold what the client’s experience might be.</p><p><strong>What do those emotions feel like?</strong></p><p>I feel a heaviness. I feel saturated sometimes. I feel lit up and glowing. Often I feel like I’m glowing from being there in such a real moment. Some of the connections are really joyful, and funny, and loving. It’s not just a gloomy dreary period of time that we spend together.</p><p><strong>How does the abortion doula role compare to being a birth doula?</strong></p><p>There are different emotional textures that you encounter in these rooms. I think also the aftermath is different. One of the things that really draws me to this work is that I’m really interested in loss and grief, and that’s what’s happening here. Even if the grief is celebratory, it still is grief and it still is loss. There’s something lost with birth too—loss of pregnancy, loss of the in-utero experience.</p><p>I had some devastating losses as a very young child and ongoing through life—mostly the deaths of people very close to me. I’ve grown from my exploration of what it is to lose and to understand that life is all about loss. How can we embrace that? How can that be something that shapes us, and colors us, and gives us substance by appreciating what it is that absence offers? I’ve never had an abortion. I have never experienced that loss, but I think there are overarching themes of the loss experience that are communicable.</p><p><strong>Does that communication work in both directions? </strong></p><p>Absolutely. There’s a reciprocity, too. I gain so much for my own grief process from witnessing how other people experience their loss. I’m touched and fueled by this work, by these courageous people.</p><p><strong>What have you learned that’s helped you in your own grief process?</strong></p><p><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 23px;">How vulnerability is where it’s at. To be courageous enough to be vulnerable with someone else can be so healing. The people who I encounter who just expose themselves to me are inspiring because I have a lot of boundaries about what I’m willing to tell people and in what moments. Ultimately, I’m very forthcoming with my stories in many contexts, but they’re narratives that I’ve already authored and I feel comfortable presenting them. But, when I’m actually in an embodied experience of panic or grief, can I reach out to somebody then?</span></p><p><strong>What’s your most important personal narrative?</strong></p><p>Certainly there are a lot of narratives around loss. I was adopted as a baby, and so there’s a theme of abandonment that I’ve entwined with the various deaths that I’ve encountered—feeling like people leave me. So for me, the narrative that comes out of that is: Who is around? Am I with myself? How can I not abandon myself? And how, by showing up for other people, can I also have that turned on me? When I show up for other people, whoever I’m with is also there with me. Part of that is also the transience of life; that everything is loss. So great: Let’s be here now and appreciate where we are and who we’re with.</p><p><strong>How did you come to your view on abortion?</strong></p><p>I was raised by this amazing woman who was a staunch feminist from the get-go. She really instilled in me a spirit of being in charge of our bodies and of our lives. I don’t recall learning what abortion was. I did have stories about my mother miscarrying before she chose to adopt, so I had some understanding of that.</p><p><strong style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 23px;">How aware are you of your opposition, the pro-life movement?</strong></p><p>I’m quite aware of them. I mean, how could one not be? It doesn’t come into the work for me. I think that politics can fuel our passion and bring us to the project, but when we’re in the clinic, politics can’t be there.</p><p><strong>How do you relate to those people?</strong></p><p>I have a lot of compassion for everybody. I think there's a lot of misinformation. I think we all have a lot of wounds that we carry around, and that the stories that we tell ourselves about how we got those wounds inform our politics and inform how we relate to people and how we judge them. And I think that I do have compassion for the people who so condemn and castigate abortion as a moral sin, because they I think have wounds that haven't been tended to, and may never be.</p><p><strong>How do you think they came to their perspective?</strong></p><p>Culture. The culture that you're in. The family that you're in. Which is how I came to mine. My culture, my climate, my family instilled these values in me. So, I can understand that we go through the same process. But, this sense of ownership they have, about somehow having a right to judge other people, I don’t do that. And I think a lot of pro-choicers do have a lot of judgment, and hatred, and anger. I don’t think it’s productive, and I don’t consider myself part of that cohort. I can get riled up about what I consider absolute abominations happening legally in a lot of ways, but I don’t hate people for it.</p><p><strong>With culture being such a powerful force in forming beliefs, do you think that yours were inevitable for you? Could you have turned out differently?</strong></p><p>I was born in Louisiana. My biological family is all there, but I was adopted by a couple who lives in Chicago—a very liberal couple. My life could've gone such a different way. I could've been raised in a small town in Louisiana with very conservative viewpoints and been deeply involved in the Catholic Church. Who knows?</p><p><strong>You could be a picketer outside an abortion clinic?</strong></p><p>I very legitimately could be. Fork in the road.</p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedSteve Snodgrass/flickrOn Being an Abortion Doula2014-03-26T12:00:00-04:002014-03-26T12:03:42-04:00The range of emotions involved in helping women terminate pregnanciestag:theatlantic.com,2014:50-283920<p>“When I was a child,” Diana Adams began, “I had a doll house and a rich fantasy life. I imagined that I was a cancer-curing surgeon, a world-class ballerina, and a TV show host all at the same time. I was also an amazing mom to all my dolls, but it was always a little mysterious about where they had come from and whether they all had the same father. A little neighbor boy once said to me, ‘I’ll be the daddy.’ I thought about that for a moment. I said, ‘No, you can be my gay lounge singer friend. That’s much more fun.’ I’ve always liked boys. I just like them better in groups.”</p><p>Over the years, the aspiring ballerina/surgeon/TV host shifted her focus to law. As a lawyer, Adams now runs a Brooklyn-based legal firm oriented toward providing traditional marriage rights to non-traditional families like the one she imagined as a kid. As an openly polyamorous woman, Diana lives inside a version of that doll house today. Along with her primary partner Ed, she is currently romantically involved with several other men and women.</p><p>I sat down recently with the 35-year-old to discuss her life and career.</p><hr><p><strong>Why does polyamory work for you?</strong></p><p>I remember from a very young age realizing that I was bisexual, and that I tended to be attracted to many different people at the same time. I really think that polyamory for me is an orientation, like being heterosexual or homosexual. Humans in general have a hard time with monogamy. That’s always been the case. We used to have a sense that it was acceptable for husbands to go out and have other lovers, but with the shift to egalitarianism, rather than to say that woman could do that too, we’ve gone in the other direction.</p><p><strong>What are the consequences of that, do you think?</strong></p><p>I think it's interesting to see the way that when people get into a monogamous couple dynamic, they often have to neuter their sexual desires. As the initial intensity of a relationship shifts to feelings of long-term love, you can end up in a sexless marriage, and I think that’s a huge contributor to infidelity and the breakup of a lot of families. We put so much emphasis on a partner being everything—that this person completes you<span>—</span>and when that doesn’t happen it creates a lot of pressure. I don't think that open relationships are for everyone but it's something that you should no longer feel ashamed to talk about at a time when so many marriages are failing.</p><p><strong>What do your other lovers give you that your primary partner can’t?</strong></p><p>Well, for example, with my female partners, I feel a different kind of power dynamic. I feel a protective impulse toward women I’m involved with. It's a different kind of love feeling. My partner Ed is a wonderful feminist man, though sometimes I’d really like to be out on a date with the kind of man who wants to open car doors for me and treat me like a princess. I don't want that all the time, but I might want that once a month.</p><p><strong>How do your different lovers get along with one another?</strong></p><p>They’re really good friends. The men even have a name for themselves. They call themselves “The Man Harem.” Sometimes they’ll play with that. They’ll all show up in matching clothes – wearing all pinstripes, or all red shirts, for example. They’re friends and they help each other. For instance, I just had my birthday and my partner Ed is off doing amazing work as a scientist. As a consolation, my long-term boyfriend is staying in the house for the week. So, rather than my boyfriend saying, “Wow why's your partner going out of town when it's your birthday?” he’s asking if my partner is okay having to be away for so long, if he needs support. And my partner is saying, “Thanks for taking care of Diana since I can’t be there.” There’s a real feeling of compersion. Compersion is the opposite of jealousy.</p><p><strong>That word <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compersion">compersion</a> is a really new word whereas jealousy is such an ancient concept. What role does jealousy play in your relationships?</strong></p><p>Jealousy is an emotion that we treat in a really blunt way. We often say somebody’s jealous and then that's an excuse for all sorts of bad behavior: throwing a drink in someone's face, or storming out, or manslaughter. In manslaughter, it's basically a defense: “I walked in on my wife having sex with another man and I killed them.” We treat jealousy almost with this reverence, but we don’t unpack what’s behind it. Let’s get more specific. There are different versions of jealousy. One version might be a feeling of scarcity. Another can be insecurity. The way that I discover what version I’m dealing with is that I ask myself, “How old do I feel right now?” And when I'm insecure, I'm feeling like I'm 13.</p><p><strong style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 23px;">How do you deal with those emotions?</strong></p><p>We talk a lot. We check in with each other, “Is this okay with you?” and the answer can be, “I don't know.” For instance maybe Ed and I are going to a party together and this guy that I've been dating is at the party too. “Will it feel okay with you if I go over and kiss him?” Polyamory will find your buttons and it will push them. If you don't want to have that kind of challenge, it's not the right lifestyle for you. But, if you're up for it, polyamory can be the catalyst for powerful personal growth.</p><p><strong>How does your family view your lifestyle?</strong></p><p>Well, I come from a very religious household. I mean my dad is a fundamentalist deacon, so it was hard at first. But, basically my parents have been incredibly supportive. I think that's because they get to see me having wonderful love in my life and getting a lot of support.</p><p><strong>Can you give an example?</strong></p><p>Well, a while ago my dad had a massive heart attack and two of the men in my life came together to be with my family at the hospital. They’re both scientists, so they understood what was going on with his body and were able to explain everything that was happening. Both of them had busy jobs, so they actually coordinated with each other so that one of them was there at all times.</p><p>My family was just completely awestruck, “Wow, not just one smart, compassionate, great boyfriend, but two.” I think that if they learned about it in another way, they might've thought I was being sexually exploited, but obviously I wasn’t. It was clearly something that was really nurturing.</p><p><strong>How are you using the law to empower non-traditional relationships like yours?</strong></p><p>Our laws are about 20 years behind what families actually look like. I'm working to create alternatives to marriage, because I think that if we could choose marriage affirmatively instead of it being a default, it would make relationships stronger. Marriage is an incredibly intense contract. It's a legal-financial contract that you're making, declaring that you're going to be the other person's social welfare state and safety net if they screw up. I mean, you’re signing the most important document you’ll sign in your life and people read it less carefully than a cell phone contract. People have no idea what they’re actually committing to and are horrified a lot of times when they find out.</p><p><strong>What kinds of alternatives to marriage are available?</strong></p><p>There are different options. Domestic partnership, for example, has tremendous possibility to create a more expansive version of what a relationship can look like. Domestic partnership was originally created as an alternative for gay couples who couldn’t legally get married. But then, all these surprising things started happening where these other kinds of people started using it for their own purposes. For instance, many elderly widow friends have entered into platonic domestic partnerships. It’s a situation like the <em>Golden Girls</em>. These are friends saying, “I live with her, and we watch out for each other, and I want her to be the person I can share my health insurance with.”</p><p><strong>How about in relationships with multiple partners like your own? Of the 1,200 or so rights and privileges provided by a traditional marriage contract, how many can you replicate?</strong></p><p>I can't approximate all of them, however there are a lot of rights that we don't necessarily need. For example, if you’re buried in a government cemetery, you have the right to have your spouse buried next to you. Okay, how many people does that actually apply to? There’s the right not to testify against your spouse, but [for most people], that will probably never come up.</p><p>But, th</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>ere are a lot of basic things like ensuring tax benefits, or making sure that your partner is not financially vulnerable, or if you want to be sure that you can visit your partner at the hospital, we can do a healthcare proxy. The girlfriend can get the healthcare proxy because the wife can come in automatically. We can create agreements in terms of school or the doctor's office for a third parent to a child. And, I actually think that these arrangements can be better, because people can be really clear about what they want to create. They’re not signing on to things they maybe don’t actually want.</p><p><strong>What else can you do for polyamorous unions?</strong></p><p>I’m helping one polyamorous triad right now set up an LLC so they can share their finances. We’re making them employees of their own three person corporation so that they can be covered under an employee health plan.</p><p><strong>Can you secure parental rights for a third parent to a child?</strong></p><p>There are a lot of things we can do with co-parenting. With the busy lives that we lead, I think that three adults per child is actually a great ratio. So many parents are overburdened. I work a lot with lesbian couples and sperm donors in a three-parent model. They’re basing their relationship around a child. That’s a model that many courts and policymakers can wrap their heads around better than a polyamorous triad. If one woman contributes an egg, the man contributes sperm, and the other woman acts as a gestational surrogate, then all three of them are biologically a parent. We can do a three-parent adoption.</p><p><strong>It takes a village right? </strong></p><p>Right! You know Ed and I joke sometimes that we need a wife, because I get home from work at 10 and he gets home from work at 12, and it would be really awesome if there was somebody else helping with some of the household chores and child-rearing type things. I say “wife” in a joking way. I think the gender of the person doesn't matter. But, it would be nice to have another person in the home. You know, we pay other people for help like that in America when there are other possible models that actually create an even more stable and interconnected society.</p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feed"Le déjeuner sur l'herbe" by Édouard ManetUp for Polyamory? Creating Alternatives to Marriage2014-02-19T11:02:48-05:002018-06-20T13:15:08-04:00How one lawyer helps those, like her, in non-traditional relationshipstag:theatlantic.com,2014:50-282800<figure><img alt="" height="380" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/01/4/8750937b4.jpg" width="570"><figcaption class="caption">Sophie de Oliveira Barata with one of her designer pieces. (Roc Morin)</figcaption></figure><p>There is a moment when each ultra-realistic prosthetic limb crafted by Sophie de Oliveira Barata transitions from a hunk of silicon into something more. “It happens around this point,” the artist explained, gesturing to a half-finished leg jutting mid-kick from her work bench. “I’ll know it’s happened when I handle a limb a bit roughly, and I find myself apologizing to it: ‘Oh, sorry!’”</p><p>It’s an easy mistake to make. With precision molding, hand-painted veins, and real human hairs, the limbs scattered around Sophie’s studio look uncannily real: legs on the verge of dancing and hands ready to burst into applause. With these prostheses, Sophie enables her customers to conceal their absences and blend in. But the artist also caters to another kind of clientele: amputees wanting to stand out. She works with these clients to imagine the missing parts of their bodies as fantastical works of art: an arm housing a motorized coiling snake, a jewel-studded leg with embedded stereo, a bird-wing arm with a metal hook for a talon. “Instead of seeing what’s missing,” she remarked, “you see what’s there.”</p><p>I met Sophie in her cozy London studio recently to discuss her work. After serving tea, the artist returned to the task of tenderly shaping a silicon calf as we spoke.</p><p><strong>How did you get your start in prosthetics?</strong></p><p>I actually started out in film, doing special effects make-up. Later, I heard about a job making realistic limbs for amputees. Every single limb was bespoke and made by hand. I worked for that company for years.</p><figure class="right"><img alt="" height="412" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/01/3_Brass_leg_photography_by_Omkaar_Kotedia/73f4b3e1b.jpg" width="268"><figcaption class="credit">Omkaar Kotedia</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Where did the idea of making alternative limbs come from?</strong></p><p>I was always experimenting in my spare time. Back then, I was going out quite a lot to all these crazy clubs where everyone would dress outrageously. I started sculpting costume pieces for myself.</p><p><strong>Like what?</strong></p><p>Well, there was one that had a bra on one side and a lemon squeezer on the other, plus a collar made out of loads of colored pencils. Also, I had a bit of envy, you know. I thought, why should it just be amputees that have prostheses? So, I made a silicon copy of my own feet to wear as slippers. And it was brilliant walking down the street because I’d wear socks under them. I’d be curious to catch people’s faces as they passed me, thinking, “How does she have feet on the outside of her socks?”</p><p><strong>Did you ever show your employers?</strong></p><p>Certainly not! Some of the costumes were quite risqué. I’d wait until everyone went home and I’d stay at my workplace all night sculpting, just with this crazy passion to make something. Nobody knew that I stayed the night. Whenever the janitor would come round, I’d turn out all the lights and hide. In the morning I’d pretend to leave and come back again. I’d be exhausted but very happy!</p><p><strong>How did you incorporate that kind of creativity into your prostheses?</strong></p><p>I started working with a little girl who lost her leg. It was really tragic. She was in a pushchair with her mum and granny when a bus came onto the pavement. The grandma was killed against a wall, the mother had scarring, and the little girl had to have her leg amputated. I saw her every year, because she was growing and needed a new leg. Well, she wanted something a bit different on the leg every time. It started with these little pigs that were riding bicycles and eating ice creams. The next time she wanted a Christmas scene around the top of her leg. Then she wanted all these pictures of her family: her aunty there, and her little dog over there, and her mum, and her brother. I could see that every year she was getting really excited about coming in. And, it wasn’t something she <em>had</em> to do that other people didn’t, it was something she <em>got</em> to do that other people didn’t. It was a nice event for her psychologically. So, she was quite a good inspiration.</p><figure><img alt="" height="382" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/01/Sophie_Studio_Rosemary_Williams/9de4f64c9.jpg" width="570"><figcaption class="credit">Rosemary Williams</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Do the clients always know what they want?</strong></p><p>Some of them have definite ideas of what they want. A lot of the men want to look like some kind of superhero—loads of Iron Man requests. Other people don’t know what they want at all and need you to help them pull the information out. That’s really good fun. I usually tell them to go on the Internet and just search for images that speak to them and save them in a folder. When they’ve got, say a hundred images, we’ll be able to see a pattern as to what they’re interested in—whether it’s color or composition or materials or an atmosphere—there’ll be something, and then you’ll talk that through together.</p><p><strong>Being so focused on other people’s limbs all the time, I wonder, what’s your relationship with your own limbs like?</strong></p><p>Well, it’s interesting, I feel differently about them than I did when I was younger. With my feet for example, since I started making limbs, I really like them from an artistic perspective. I’ve got loads of little thread veins. I get really excited if an older person comes in for a realistic limb, because it just means more detail. There’s more personality there. Of course, not everybody feels that way. I had a woman come over the other day to watch me sculpt a leg for her. Originally, all she wanted was a match of her existing leg, but when I gave her the opportunity for feedback, she said “I don’t want the yellow on the toenails, and maybe not so many veins.” And it’s like, “Hold on a minute, it’s not going to look anything like the other one!”</p><p><strong>You mentioned that you used to feel differently about your limbs. How did you feel about them when you were a kid, for example?</strong></p><p>It’s funny you mention that. You know how vertigo is the fear of wanting to jump off things? Well, sometimes, actually, because my hands mean so much to me, if [I saw] something like a big churning thing, I’d be like, “Oh, God, keep it away! I might put my hand in there!” And, it was just the idea of having control over your destiny. That if I put my hand in there, it would ruin everything, but for that split second I’d have control over the whole of my destiny and that would be quite an empowering thing. Of course, <span>that would destroy my chances of being creative with my hands</span>, so I chose not to.</p><figure class="left"><img alt="" height="251" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2014/01/3_Gadget_arm_photography_by_Omkaar_Kotedia/7920d9d22.jpg" width="368"><figcaption class="credit">Omkaar Kotedia</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Do you think that fascination had anything to do with the profession you’ve chosen?</strong></p><p>Maybe! Of course, I don’t have that impulse anymore. I feel like I’ve gotten a lot simpler as I’ve gotten older, but life’s a lot easier as a result of it.</p><p><strong>Have you thought about what kind of limbs you’d make for yourself if you were an amputee?</strong></p><p>Maybe super strong arms or something…</p><p><strong>What would you do with them?</strong></p><p>I don’t know! Hmm… well, I always thought it would be quite sweet to have a sweet dispenser leg—maybe a bubble gum machine with lovely metalwork. You’d press a button and a gumball would spiral down. The kids would all crowd around your leg, grab the sweets, and just take off. Ideally, I’d like to have a bunch of limbs, all interchangeable, each one reflecting a different part of myself back at me. </p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedRoc MorinThe Art of Designer Artificial Limbs2014-01-15T14:01:00-05:002014-01-21T16:40:01-05:00Sophie de Oliveira Barata makes hyper-realistic prostheses as well as elaborate costume limbs that reflect the wearer&#39;s personality.tag:theatlantic.com,2013:50-280616<figure><img alt="[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/3amigos_banner.jpg"><figcaption class="credit">(<em>Courtesy Firdaus Kharas</em>)</figcaption></figure><p>“In order to stop rape, I had to make rape funny,” Firdaus Kharas said. The 57-year-old social entrepreneur was seated across from me in the gaudy dining hall of a cruise ship off the coast of Italy. The bustling tuxedoed waiters and prim musicians formed an incongruous backdrop for Kharas’ stories of human suffering: children dying of AIDS in Africa, battered wives in India, a Cambodian village where the women draw lots nightly to determine who will be raped by the Khmer Rouge. As a philanthropic producer of public service animations for the developing world, Kharas insists that humor is the most effective means to convey his message.</p><p>I joined Kharas in his cabin several days later, as the bucolic coastline of Turkey scrolled by, to discuss his humanitarian work.</p><figure class="right golden-ratio-big"><img alt="[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/Kharas.jpg"><figcaption>Firdaus Kharas (<em>Roc Morin</em>)</figcaption></figure><p><strong>How did you get into public service?</strong></p><p>I grew up in Calcutta, and there were huge disparities between rich and poor. I went to school every day in a rickshaw with a guy pulling me. I grew up being aware of my privileges, but at the same time, because of that, you have social responsibilities. My mother taught me that. She was the head of this NGO, and she would take me along on the various projects she was involved in. In high school, I taught in a slum every Saturday. I went to a very elite school—today a lot of my classmates are billionaires—and we taught in the slum essentially what we were learning in our elite school. Whoever wanted to come would come.</p><p><strong>Can you explain the idea behind your company?</strong></p><p>I started Chocolate Moose Media back in 1995 as a social enterprise: a hybrid organization split between doing for-profit work and non-profit work. I use the one to subsidize the other.</p><p><strong>How would you describe your non-profit work?</strong></p><p>We make animated media that deals with social issues around the world in order to influence individuals to change their behavior.</p><p><strong>Why do you use animation?</strong></p><p>The main thing is that animation gives you a sense of disbelief. You know what you’re seeing is not real. So, in the case of HIV/AIDS prevention, for example, we have “The Three Amigos,” three animated condoms. They have arms, they have faces, and they talk. You know what you’re seeing is not real, therefore you’re not offended. If I made a campaign with real condoms, it would have been thrown off the air in many countries. But we got condoms on the air in conservative Iran, in conservative Hindu India, in multicultural South Africa, precisely because they are animated.</p><p><strong>What has your reach been with that campaign so far?</strong></p><p>We’re up to 45 languages now, so we can reach 85 percent of the world’s population in their own language. NGOs play them on laptops when they go out in the field, they’re played on Jumbotrons in soccer stadiums, in cinemas before movies, on mobile trucks that go into villages. It’s hard to get an exact figure, but I’m safe in saying that the campaign’s been seen by more than 1 billion people. Apparently, you can walk into any pharmacy in South Africa, ask for an amigo, and they’ll give you a condom.</p><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sgbj8rciDa4" width="570"></iframe><p><strong>So, with your audience as multicultural as it is, how are you able to design one spot that appeals to everyone?</strong></p><p>Animation is universal. I can make universal characters. You saw in our domestic violence campaign “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW_nnf-WJeY&amp;list=PL16B4D4D378C4461A">No Excuses</a>,” that the characters are blue. Nobody is really blue. Obviously if we had made white characters, or black characters, or brown characters it would have denoted some kind of ethnicity and therefore my audience would have been limited.</p><p><strong>But naturally, you’re going to have to make some culturally-specific choices, aren't you? Clothing for instance?</strong></p><p>Actually, originally, I wanted no clothing at all. Clothing was very hard to do because it’s so country-specific. We decided to come up with this neutral clothing.</p><p><strong>What about head scarves?</strong></p><p>That was an issue for us in “Hind and Hamza.” It's the 46-episode series on values we did on the Al Jazeera Children's Channel, beamed via satellite into millions of households across the Middle East. Each episode promotes a different value, things like: eagerness to learn and explore, kindness to animals, moderation… Anyway, the Hijab posed a problem. We talked about it. Are we going to have the girls covered? No, none of the girls are covered. Are we going to have middle-aged women covered? Sometimes. Are we going to have the older generation covered? Yes. We went through this kind of thinking in terms of finding middle ground.</p><p><strong>Did you receive any criticism for that?</strong></p><p>We thought there was going to be a fatwa against me, but as it turned out, nothing happened. I had a lot more death threats from “The Three Amigos,” with people saying that promoting condom use promotes promiscuity. I remember one guy saying he was going to behead me.</p><p><strong>I guess he didn't get the joke, did he? I want to talk about your use of humor. You said back when we first met, that you had made rape funny. How did you do that?</strong></p><p>In one of the spots we did, for example, we had a professor explaining why rapists are less intelligent than chimpanzees.</p><p><strong>Is it really possible to find humor in any situation?</strong></p><p>The answer is yes. I thought about it for a while. I can’t think of a single subject that we can’t tackle using the right approach.</p><p><strong>Why is humor the right approach?</strong></p><p>Because humor doesn't coerce people. I don’t believe that you can coerce a person into changing their behavior. The best example of that is a typical domestic violence campaign. Most of them will show a battered woman. They’ll show a woman who is bloodied and say, this is what we’re trying to prevent. I have two problems with that. First of all, it further stigmatizes the woman. And secondly, it doesn't address the abuser. You’re showing the image of the abused when you’re trying to affect the behavior of the abuser.</p><p><strong>What do you think the intended target feels when he watches your work?</strong></p><p>I hope that it gets him thinking. I believe that if we were to coerce people and say, “Thou shalt not do this,” you’re not going to get much behavior change. “Who are you to tell me what to do with my wife?” It’s very difficult to argue with that person because they have a huge sense of empowerment from their history, their culture, their religion. I think if you want to reach that kind of person, you must get them to see the light themself. You can’t impose it externally.</p><figure><img alt="[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/No%20Excuses%20banner.jpg"><figcaption>A scene from "No Excuses" (<em>Courtesy Firdaus Kharas</em>)</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Is everyone capable of that kind of change? How about a member of the Taliban? They’re violently opposed to your values—female education, for example. </strong></p><p>For me that’s a perversion of their religion.</p><p><strong>Can you argue against it in a way that the Taliban could understand?</strong></p><p>Absolutely. I think all my spots, the Taliban can understand.</p><p><strong>Understand and accept?</strong></p><p>Absolutely. You persuade that Taliban as a parent that their own child should go to school. Not just other children, their own children. Their own girls. Everyone is capable of being communicated with. All seven billion on the planet.</p><p><strong>Where does the misunderstanding come from then?</strong></p><p>Somehow, over the years we've allowed ethnicities and boundaries and cultures to get in the way. We were, years and years ago, a human family. I've met with many people who say: my first priority is my religion, the second is my tribe, the third my country. Nobody ever says, my first priority is as a human being. It’s a fundamental shift we have to make in people’s thinking. If we did not have political boundaries in the world—if we did not have religions, ethnicities, cultures, histories, backgrounds, we would find that most of the world’s problems would vanish instantly.</p><p><strong>If everyone was just blue?</strong></p><p>
Exactly. </p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedFirdaus KharasTalking Condoms Make Safe Sex Campaigns Acceptable in Conservative Countries2013-10-18T11:38:00-04:002013-10-18T11:52:16-04:00Using animation and humor to get important public health messages on the airtag:theatlantic.com,2013:50-280579<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/goering.jpg" style="width: 570px; height: 607px;"><figcaption class="credit">AP</figcaption></figure><p>"After the last right turn," Bettina's directions read, "you will see a driveway on the left about 50 feet from the corner. The number 290 is placed on a fence post. (Many people can't seem to see this sign and go to the end of the road where they get shot, game lost!)"</p><p>It was a dark little joke, the kind of gallows humor I got used to hearing as an EMT and <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/reading-taliban-love-poems-in-an-afghan-prison">war correspondent</a>--professions overly preoccupied with mortality. The attitude fit Bettina Goering well. As great-niece of Nazi Germany's second in command, Hermann Goering, death is her family legacy.</p><p>I tracked the 56 year-old down in Santa Fe at the office where she works as an acupuncturist living under the surname of her ex-husband, which she didn't want named in this story. Bettina invited me to her home outside the city for a formal interview. The last eight miles of the drive took nearly an hour as I bounded and jerked over a tangle of third-world roads, trailing a comet tail of dust. It had rained hard the week before, forcing the persistently barren land to yield lush displays of green, with only cows and horses around to enjoy it.</p><p>Bettina met me at the door of her modern two-story home. "You found it!" she exclaimed in her heavy German accent.</p><p>"No one's more surprised than me!" I replied with a laugh. "This place seems to want to stay lost."</p><p>She led me to her kitchen where her husband of 23 years, Adi Pieper, sat behind a table. We shook hands. The house was nearly empty: no clutter, no personal items. It seemed to be a place without memory. I later learned that the couple was in the process of selling their property and had purposefully made it neutral.</p><p>"So," I began, "you had the name Goering when you were growing up in Germany. Was there a stigma?"</p><p>"Not really," Bettina replied. "That is the weird thing. Because I grew up in the 50s and early 60s, there was this time of utter denial. Germany had just dug itself out of its past and they were starting to get wealthy again. Later, there were a few people who would make me cringe by saying Hermann was a good guy."</p><p>"My mother said that," Adi added, "'Oh, we all loved him,' she said, when she found out Bettina and I were starting a relationship. He was the most liked one, the most popular Nazi. He appeared so royal, so nice."</p><p>"Like a big child," Bettina added.</p><p>"You've met with the children of Holocaust survivors and have spoken publicly about your family history. Why do you feel that you have to embrace this Goering identity?" I asked.</p><p>"It was never a choice," she replied. " That's how I choose to deal with conflicts."</p><p>"What about the rest of your family, growing up?"</p><p>"I had trouble at home. That's the gist of the matter. My parents were always a bit rocky together, their relationship. But, when I was about 10 or 11 my grandmother from my father's side--the Goering side--moved in because she was very sick. That created so much more drama. She was the Nazi in the family and she was very difficult to deal with. She was in the last stages of syphilis, and that makes you very stuck in your ways. Your pupils don't move anymore, for example. They just stay in one stage. I think it literally eats up your brain. So, she made whatever trouble was there before even worse. I left home at the age of 13 after a fight with my dad."</p><p>"What kind of things did she believe?"</p><p>"It's hard to just put it in a few words. She had always this upper-class demeanor, that you think you're better than everyone."</p><p>"Not to mention that the Holocaust never happened," Adi interjected. "'All lies! All lies!'"</p><p>"It came up," Bettina continued. "because we watched a documentary on TV. It was about Auschwitz."</p><p>"Was that your first knowledge of the Holocaust?"</p><p>"That was one of them for sure."</p><p>"How did you feel?"</p><p>"I felt horrible! I felt even more horrible she'd deny it. And she was part of it. If anyone was part of it, she was."</p><p>"How so?"</p><p>"Well, she was very close to Hermann and she was in charge of the Red Cross. She should have known, you would think. I mean, they made Theresienstadt for the Red Cross. They built it in such a way with false walls and everything so that it looked like a nice working camp where they had theater groups and all kinds of stuff."</p><p>"Right," I added, "that was their showpiece concentration camp to demonstrate that the Nazis were humanitarians. Of course, they shipped off half the prisoners to Auschwitz before visitors came so it wouldn't look overcrowded."</p><p>"Maybe she believed the fantasy. At the same time, we found out later that she did some very shady deals with Jewish people who paid their way out of Germany. Hermann Goering did a bunch of deals for art or land."</p><p>"Did your grandmother have a good side?"</p><p>"I really judged this family as negative, almost all of them. That's something that I've been now working to change, and I'm seeing a much more complex picture even of my grandmother. It's very illuminating."</p><p>"What changed?"</p><p>"I did research. My grandmother was brought up in a family where all the men died all the time. They were all military. Her father died when she was five. There were so many wars back then."</p><p>"Yes, you can imagine that with so much loss in her life, she had to convince herself it was for something worthwhile."</p><p>"Exactly."</p><p>"Do you see any goodness in Hermann?"</p><p>"That's hard to say. Is somebody ever totally bad or good? I hope not. I think certain circumstances happen that might turn somebody into a psychopath. When I see Hermann as a family person, I think he's really nice, and charming, and incredibly caretaking, and it's hard for me to see flaws. But then you see what he does in politics and how he killed people, including his so-called friends."</p><p>"What do you mean?"</p><p>"Are you familiar with the Röhm Putsch?"</p><p>"You mean when the Nazis purged the army?"</p><p>"That shocked me almost more than some of his later actions, because they were his friends. He had no qualms to shoot just anybody."</p><p>"Are you afraid that you inherited some of his traits?"</p><p>"Yes and no. I met a cousin that I hadn't seen in nearly 50 years and we both have big qualms to do anything too big--to be in a position of any power because there is something in the background that you could do something bad."</p><p>"And you have the desire for power?"</p><p>"No, not even. But, it's happened. I'm somebody who naturally takes charge, who can easily be in charge of people, but it scares me at the same time that I could abuse the power as he did. It's a collective consciousness thing. It might be in my DNA. I think they're starting to prove that all the experiences of your ancestors manifest themselves in the DNA."</p><p>"Interesting," I said. "I have Jewish friends who have dreams of being in the Holocaust."</p><p>"That's what I mean. It's in your DNA somewhere. Sometimes I get feelings that I cannot explain. I experience also the Holocaust. Do we have past lives? How come I have visions of that too?"</p><p>"Can you describe that experience?"</p><p>"We were in Weimar a few years ago, next to Buchenwald, one of the concentration camps. It was like these ghosts had attached themselves to me. Afterwards I couldn't eat."</p><p>"What did it feel like?"</p><p>"Like I wasn't myself. I was really depressed, afraid. I had a vision of being in a small attic room, it could have been in Germany, afraid for my life. I personally think there are past lives for sure."</p><p>"So, the implication is that you were a Jew in another life?"</p><p>"Or somebody who was persecuted, or a member of the resistance."</p><p>"Getting back to the issue of DNA, I wanted to ask you about your decision to sterilize yourself. Were you worried about continuing Hermann's legacy?"</p><p>"It's complex. I was about 30 when I did it. I was living in a commune with Osho <a href="http://www.osho.com/">in Pune, India</a> and a lot of people did it in that commune. There are too many kids in the world, so I won't have any. My brother did it too."</p><p>"So, it wasn't specifically the Goering genes?"</p><p>"No. However, when my brother did it he said, 'I cut the line.' He's dramatic like that. And when he said that, it became clear to me that that must have influenced me too. I had a fear about my own power to maybe pass something on."</p><p>"What was it like living in the Osho commune?"</p><p>"There were a lot of Germans, Jews, and Japanese there. It was the 70s and it was like the kids of World War II all came together in a friendly way. And some of it was in encounter groups where you lived out some of these old experiences."</p><p>"What kind of experiences?"</p><p>Bettina glanced at her husband. </p><p>"For example," Adi offered, "I'm from Berlin, so I'm Prussian. They had me stand up and march and they all threw pillows at me, yelling 'You fucking Nazi!' They called me <em>Obersturmbannführer</em> and I had to just take that all in. They asked, 'How do you feel about that? That's what your parents did and that's what you are because you are their child.' And I felt a big collective guilt inside that I wasn't aware of. Nobody in my family did anything, but I still have this guilt. I didn't know I had it. I was so surprised."</p><p>"Were you able to get past it?"</p><p>"It's never totally past. You just put awareness to it so that it has no more power over you."</p><p>"Is that part of what coming to America represents--a clean start?"</p><p>"Part of it."</p><p>"So, having left Germany, do you still participate in German culture?"</p><p>"For sure," replied Adi. "We go to the opera..."</p><p>"Wagner?" I queried.</p><p>"No."</p><p>"When you say no, is that a reaction against the music or the composer?"</p><p>"No, I think it's nice music. It's really good. But, he was an anti-Semite."</p><p>"So, even musical notes can accumulate guilt?"</p><p>"Quite amazing."</p><p>"What else do you have from Germany?" I asked, turning back to Bettina. "Any heirlooms from Hermann?"</p><p>"Just photographs of him with my father and grandmother. I have a Goering insignia ring, which I actually wear. I inherited it from my mom when she died."</p><p>When I asked to see the photographs, Bettina pulled out an album and began to flip through.</p><p>"What do you see when you look at these photographs?" I asked.</p><p>"Different things. These are a bunch of my uncles--the brothers of my father who died so young. I've developed almost a relationship to them. It's funny. I got to know them or something. I feel like they are asking me to remember them."</p><p>"You got to know them through the photographs?"</p><p>"Yes, though sometimes I wonder if I should get rid of this album. I'm the only one who has any relation to these guys. Nobody else does. My brother doesn't and we're the last of the line."</p><p>"Can you talk more about the relationship you've developed with these images?"</p><p>"So, I had an illumination about the boy," she said, pointing at a photograph of her uncle, Peter Goering. "He was only a boy. He was 19. As I got to know more about them, I felt really bad. I felt the grief of losing them so young--of my father and my grandmother--I felt that."</p><p>"And what do you see when you look at the pictures of them with Hermann?"</p><p>"He's very proud of them, and they are proud of him. You can tell."</p><p>"You can see in the picture how much they love each other?"</p><p>"Yeah, yeah, for sure."</p><p>"Do you see a resemblance between Hermann and yourself?'</p><p>"Sure--cheekbones, nose, even the mouth. I was a teenager when I first saw a photograph of him before he got fat, back when he was young, and I took a deep breath."</p><p>"How did you feel?"</p><p>"I was shocked. I ripped it up. I was like, 'Fuck, is that me?'"</p>Roc Morinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/roc-morin/?utm_source=feedAPAn Interview With Nazi Leader Hermann Goering's Great-Niece 2013-10-16T09:00:00-04:002013-10-17T14:17:17-04:00How do you cope with evil ancestry?